Web infrastructure company Cloudflare detected and stopped a record-breaking distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack this weekend. The largest recorded peak was 71 million requests per second (rps), which is 35% more than the previous largest DDoS attack, claimed Cloudflare.
Traffic from dozens of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks was controlled by the web performance and security company.
Details about the large-scale DDoS attack
The peak in the DDoS attack was observed by the security company in the range of 50-70 million rps ultimately reaching up to 71 million, according to the Cloudflare report.
It was an HTTP/2-based attack and targeted well-known gaming providers, hosting providers, cloud computing platforms, and cryptocurrency companies.
Image showing the peak in the DDoS attack in seconds (Photo: Cloudflare)
The websites were incidentally secured by Cloudflare. The source of the attack was traced to be nearly 30,000 IP addresses from several cloud providers using botnets which the internet infrastructure company is currently working to detect.
The culprits behind this large DDoS attack, the company clarified, were not related to the Super Bowl or Killnet DDoS campaigns targeting the healthcare sector.
Automated controls to detect and prevent DDoS attacks
The Cyber Express reached out to Cloudflare to shed light on the prevalence and mitigation methods for similar DDoS attacks. The most vulnerable systems are those relying on legacy solutions offering stand-by solutions.
“Routing to a stand-by (i.e. out-of-path, or on-demand) does not solve for the modern attack landscape where even the largest attacks are only seconds or minutes long,” Omer Yoachimik, Product Manager, Cloudflare told The Cyber Express.
The best approach to protect against HTTP DDoS attacks requires opting for an L7 reverse-proxy based service, Yoachimik further stated. Just like DNS servers that seek the use of a DNS reverse-proxy.
In order to protect critical infrastructure from using tools that organizations pay for, Yoachimik pressed on the need for leveraging the full suite of tools provided by vendors.
Yoachimik reiterated the importance of not depending on legacy DDoS defense solutions and using automated solutions that can monitor and mitigate round the clock.
The details about the group behind the DDoS attack cannot be shared with The Cyber Express by Cloudflare at the time of writing. The company has been working with the infosec community to defang the botnet.
Since the company has been detecting several DDoS attacks traced to cloud computing providers, it announced a free Botnet threat feed that will provide the security details of their own IP addresses.
The earlier records of DDoS attacks
The previous record of the largest DDoS attack was witnessed on June 1, 2022, which included 46 million rps. It was mitigated by Google cloud.
The traffic was traced back to 5,256 IP addresses based in 132 countries including Indonesia, India, Brazil, and Russia. TOR exit nodes were also traced in 22% of the IPs adding 3% to the flood of traffic. This DDoS broke its previous largest record of 17.2 million rps.
Europol takes down webstresser.org
The world’s biggest DDoS marketplace selling DDoS as a service was taken down by Europol on 24 April 2018. The administrator of the marketplace under the name webstresser.org was nabbed in Operation Power Off with the collaboration of the Dutch Police, UK’s National Crime Agency, Europol, and a dozen other law enforcement agencies around the world.
Webstressers operated from Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Its infrastructure from the United States of America, Germany, and the Netherlands was wiped out.
DDoS attack mitigation
Ransom DDoS attacks are on a rise behind DDoS attacks. Ransom DDoS attacks include leaving a ransom note after sending huge traffic on a network demanding money against stopping the attacks.
Other types of DDoS attacks include application-layer DDoS attacks and network-layer DDoS attacks. DDoS attacks can be mitigated by using the right tools. Cloudflare outlined the following:
- Setting the DDoS managed rules to default settings i.e., high sensitivity level.
- Opting for advanced DDoS protection service including Adaptive DDoS protection to mitigate attacks.
- Using a firewall and putting a limit to the traffic reaching one’s website.
- Reducing connections to the public internet and enabling specific IP addresses.
- Enabling DDoS alerts to have a better response time.