Security News > 2021 > September > New Mēris botnet breaks DDoS record with 21.8 million RPS attack
A new distributed denial-of-service botnet that kept growing over the summer has been hammering Russian internet giant Yandex for the past month, the attack peaking at the unprecedented rate of 21.8 million requests per second.
The botnet received the name Mēris, and it gets its power from tens of thousands of compromised devices that researchers believe to be primarily powerful networking equipment.
Information collected separately from several attacks deployed by the new Mēris botnet, showed a striking force of more than 30,000 devices.
Mēris is the same botnet responsible for generating the largest volume of attack traffic that Cloudflare recorded and mitigated to date, as it peaked at 17.2 million requests per second.
To deploy an attack, the researchers say that Mēris relies on the SOCKS4 proxy at the compromised device, uses the HTTP pipelining DDoS technique, and port 5678.
The range of RouterOS versions that Yandex and Qrator Labs observed in attacks from Mēris botnet varies greatly and includes devices running newer firmware versions, such as the current stable one and its predecessor, 6.48.3.