Security News > 2021 > August > HTTP DDoS attacks reach unprecedented 17 million requests per second
A distributed denial-of-service attack earlier this year takes the top spot for the largest such incident, peaking at 17.2 million requests per second.
The attack was recorded by Cloudflare's DDoS protection systems and accounted for almost 70% of all average rate for legitimate HTTP traffic for the second quarter of 2021.
Omer Yoachimik, product manager for Cloudflare's DDoS Protection Service, says that this HTTP DDoS attack that Cloudflare mitigated is "Almost three times larger than any previous one that we're aware of."
To paint a better picture of the magnitude of the assault, Cloudflare's typical serving load is above 25 million HTTP requests every second.
Yoachimik says that the botnet behind the attack just last week has also targeted a hosting provider with the same type of attack but its peak was below eight million requests per second.
Other notable DDoS attacks that Cloudflare detected and thwarted came from a Mirai-based botnet that showed more than once it could send more than one terabyte of bad traffic every second.