Web giant Cloudflare has reportedly detected and mitigated a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that peaked just below 2Tbps, making it potentially the largest ever seen.
The company says that the mammoth attack was launched from approximately 15,000 bots running a variant of the original Mirai code on Internet of Things (IoT) devices and unpatched GitLab instances.
Analyzing the attack that lasted only about a minute, the company believes that it was a multi-vector attack that combined both DNS amplification attacks along with UDP floods.
“Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet — one that is secure, faster, and more reliable for everyone. The DDoS team’s vision is derived from this mission: our goal is to make the impact of DDoS attacks a thing of the past,” assures Cloudflare in a blog post detailing the attack.
Blocking DDoS attacks
Cloudflare says that once its systems detected the attack traffic, they automatically generated a real-time signature, which was then used by its entire network to find attack patterns.
The company claims this strategy of using fingerprinted rules helps it mitigate DDoS attacks without impacting legitimate traffic, nor does it introduce any latency or impact performance.
Cloudflare’s DDos protection has been winning fans across the industry. In fact, many of the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers that have been facing an onslaught of DDoS attacks from ransomware operators, have found refuge in Cloudflare’s Magic Trust network security solution thanks to its built-in DDoS protection functionality.
In a recent trend analysis of DDoS attacks in Q3 2021, the company noticed a 44% increase in network-layer DDoS attacks, with multiple terabit-strong DDoS attacks.
“While the fourth quarter is not over yet, we have, again, seen multiple terabit-strong attacks that targeted Cloudflare customers,” shares Cloudflare, adding that the latest attack adds to the trend of increased attack intensity.
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