Cloudflare disclosed that its automated defenses intercepted and neutralized a record-shattering Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) assault peaking at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps).
The attack, characterized as a hyper-volumetric UDP flood, lasted just 35 seconds but set a new industry high for network bandwidth consumed by malicious traffic.
Detailed analysis from Cloudflare shows that the majority of the attack traffic was staged through compromised resources on the Google Cloud Platform.
Cloudflare’s security telemetry captured a sudden spike from negligible background noise to more than 11 Tbps in under 10 seconds.
Within moments, the company’s automated mitigation systems identified the abnormal flow of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets and applied targeted rate-limiting rules and IP-based filtering to choke off the traffic surge.
A graphic shared by Cloudflare revealed the striking lifecycle of the attack: a steep ascent to peak volume, followed by an immediate descent as defenses took effect.
This mega-scale incident underscores the growing trend of cybercriminals leveraging the elastic capacity of public cloud infrastructures.
By compromising virtual machines and container instances within Google Cloud, attackers can marshal enormous botnets capable of overwhelming even the most robust on-premises data centers.
Unlike TCP-based floods, UDP flood attacks exploit the stateless nature of the protocol, forcing victim servers to allocate resources for every incoming packet until they can no longer service legitimate connections.
Cloudflare noted that this latest assault is part of a broader wave of hyper-volumetric DDoS campaigns witnessed over recent weeks.
In that period, its network blocked hundreds of DDoS attempts exceeding 1 Tbps, including one that unleashed 5.1 billion packets per second (Bpps) in a separate UDP flood.
These events illustrate the increasingly sophisticated tactics adversaries deploy to disrupt online services and the vital role of real-time, automated defense platforms.
Industry experts caution that DDoS attacks are evolving in both scale and frequency. Public cloud platforms’ pay-as-you-go billing and virtually unlimited bandwidth make them attractive for threat actors seeking transient yet devastating surges of traffic.
Traditional perimeter defenses and manual incident response protocols often cannot react swiftly enough to contain attacks that rise and fall within seconds.
In response, Cloudflare has reiterated its commitment to transparency and readiness. The company plans to publish a comprehensive post-mortem report detailing the attack’s origin, the compromised workloads, and the specific mitigation strategies deployed.
This report aims to help network operators, cloud service providers, and enterprise security teams bolster their defenses against future hyper-volumetric threats.
As online services become increasingly critical to commerce, communication, and infrastructure, the stakes for effective DDoS protection continue to rise.
Cloudflare’s successful mitigation of an 11.5 Tbps UDP flood demonstrates that automated, cloud-scale security platforms are essential in detecting, analyzing, and neutralizing high-velocity attacks that can materialize and vanish in the blink of an eye.
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