Cloudflare mitigated record-breaking DDoS attack of 5.6 Tbps

On October 29, 2024, Cloudflare’s DDoS defense systems successfully detected and blocked a 5.6 Terabits per second (Tbps) DDoS attack, which is the largest attack ever reported.
The DDoS attack lasted 80 seconds and originated from over 13,000 Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Those devices were controlled by a Mirai-variant botnet and targeted an internet service provider (ISP) from Eastern Asia.
“Detection and mitigation were fully autonomous by Cloudflare’s distributed defense systems. It required no human intervention, didn’t trigger any alerts, and didn’t cause any performance degradation. The systems worked as intended,” Cloudflare says in its 20th DDoS Threat Report.
The previous record-breaking DDoS attack took place on October 1, 2024, blocking 3.8 Tbps and 2.14 billion packets per second (pps).
The internet and security services provider blocked approximately 21.3 million DDoS attacks in 2024, which is an increment of 53% compared to 2023. This means that Cloudflare blocked 4,780 DDoS attacks per hour on average.
Hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks have started to become more frequent, especially in the fourth quarter, Cloudflare says. Over 420 attacks were hyper-volumetric, exceeding rates of 1 billion pps and 1 Tbps. Moreover, the amount of attacks exceeding 1 Tbps grew by a staggering 1,885% quarter-over-quarter. 16% of the attacks that exceeded 100 million pps also exceeded 1 billion pps.
Overall, there was a significant decrease in the duration of DDoS attacks. According to Cloudflare, because of the short duration of most attacks, it’s not feasible for a human to respond to an alert, analyze the traffic, and apply mitigation.
In the fourth quarter of 2024, Indonesia remained the largest source of DDoS attacks worldwide. The most attacked targets were in China, Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Germany. In 40% of all cases, a competitor was responsible for the DDoS attack, followed by a state-sponsored attacker (17%), and a disgruntled customer or user (17%).
Looking back, the most ransom DDoS attacks in 2024 took place in May, with gradual increases in October, November, and December. The telecommunications, service providers and carriers were the most attacked industries, followed by marketing & advertising, IT service providers, and gambling.
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