Security News > 2021 > August > Cloudflare mitigated one of the largest DDoS attack involving 17.2 million rps
Web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare on Thursday disclosed that it mitigated the largest ever volumetric distributed denial of service attack recorded to date.
"Within seconds, the botnet bombarded the Cloudflare edge with over 330 million attack requests," the company noted, at one point reaching a record high of 17.2 million requests-per-second, making it three times bigger than previously reported HTTP DDoS attacks.
Volumetric DDoS attacks are designed to target a specific network with an intention to overwhelm its bandwidth capacity and often utilize reflective amplification techniques to scale their attack and cause as much operational disruption as possible.
What's more, the 17.2 million rps alone accounted for 68% of the average rps rate of legitimate HTTP traffic processed by Cloudflare in Q2 2021, which is at 25 million HTTP rps.
Cloudflare noted that the same Mirai botnet was used to strike a hosting provider with an HTTP DDoS attack that peaked a little below 8 million rps.
Separately, a Mirai-variant botnet was observed launching over a dozen UDP and TCP-based DDoS attacks that peaked multiple times above 1 Tbps. The company said the unsuccessful attacks were aimed at a gaming company and a major Asia Pacific-based internet services, telecommunications, and hosting provider.