Distributed denial of service attacks rose sharply during the third-quarter, fueled by record-level attacks from the Aisuru botnet, comprising between one and four million hosts across the globe, according to a report released Wednesday by Cloudflare.
The number of attacks rose 54% quarter over quarter, averaging about 14 hyper-volumetric attacks daily, according to Cloudflare. Researchers called the scale of these attacks “unprecedented,” reaching 29.7 terabits per second and 14.1 billion packets per second.
The record-breaking 29.7 Tbps attack was a User Datagram Protocol carpet-bombing attack that hit an average of 15,000 destination ports per second, according to Cloudflare.
Aisuru targeted a number of critical industries, including telecommunications, financial services, hosting providers and gaming companies.
As previously reported, Microsoft last month said it neutralized a record setting attack linked to Aisuru in October. That attack measured 15.72 Tbps and 3.64 billion packets per second, which Microsoft said was the largest single attack ever recorded in the cloud.
Cloudflare said it detected and mitigated 8.3 million DDoS attacks during the third quarter, representing a 40% increase year over year and a 15% rise quarter-over-quarter.
The Cloudflare report also showed a surge in attacks against AI companies, with DDoS traffic up 347% against the industry month over month in September. The rise in attacks coincided with heightened public debate over AI regulations.