In a stark reminder of how vulnerable online services remain, Qrator Labs has revealed that a sprawling Layer 7 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet has swelled to over 5.76 million compromised devices, unleashing unprecedented traffic against critical infrastructures.
Monitored since late March, the botnet has been used in a series of three large-scale attacks that demonstrate both its rapid growth and the formidable challenge it poses to current DDoS mitigation strategies.
The botnet’s inaugural assault was detected on March 26, when approximately 1.33 million unique IP addresses converged on an online betting organization’s web applications.
Qrator Labs’ telemetry data shows that the majority of participating devices hailed from Brazil, Argentina, Russia, Iraq, and Mexico.
Within minutes, the targeted servers were inundated with HTTP GET requests designed to exhaust application-layer resources, resulting in service degradation and intermittent outages for end users.
Security teams scrambled to apply rate-limiting rules and web application firewall (WAF) signatures, but the sheer volume of concurrent connections strained even well-provisioned infrastructures.
Government Sector Targeting
Barely two months later, on May 16, the botnet reemerged with a staggering increase in size—now exploiting 4.6 million devices.
This time, the chosen victim operated within the government sector, where open-source portals and citizen-facing services were hit with a tsunami of malicious requests.
The geographic distribution of the botnet had shifted modestly: Brazil remained the top contributor of attack traffic, but the United States, Vietnam, India, and Argentina also supplied significant botnet resources.
Analysts noted that traffic patterns incorporated a mix of request intensities, suggesting modular command-and-control directives capable of fine-tuned amplification.
Despite rapid incident response and traffic diversion to scrubbing centers, the attack persisted for over four hours, forcing some agencies to implement emergency failover to alternate data centers.
Two-Wave Onslaught Peaks at 5.76M Devices
By early September, Qrator Labs observed the botnet’s most potent operation yet. On the third occasion, again targeting government-related services, the threat actors partitioned the campaign into two successive waves.
The first involved roughly 2.8 million IP addresses, sending millions of requests per second to exhaust application endpoints.
Approximately one hour later, an additional 3 million compromised devices joined the fray, bringing the total attack force to 5.76 million.
Brazil supplied the lion’s share of bot traffic (1.41 million IPs), followed by Vietnam (661 000), the United States (647 000), India (408 000), and Argentina (162 000).
During the three-month span between the second and third campaigns, Vietnam and India exhibited the steepest growth—up 83 percent and 202 percent respectively—highlighting regions where device compromise accelerated most rapidly.
“When targeting unprotected or poorly protected resources, a DDoS botnet of this scale can generate tens of millions of requests per second, overwhelming servers within minutes,” warned Andrey Leskin, CTO at Qrator Labs.
“What’s more, not every DDoS protection provider is capable of withstanding such a massive attack, which means the availability of all their clients’ resources could be at risk simultaneously.”
Mitigations
The evolution of this botnet underscores the persistent threat of large-scale Layer 7 attacks, which leverage application-level HTTP flood techniques to bypass network-level defenses.
Organizations reliant on cloud-based WAF services or third-party scrubbing centers must validate that their DDoS protection can dynamically scale to absorb sudden traffic spikes.
Traffic anomaly detection, behavioral fingerprinting, and geo-blocking remain critical components of a multi-layered defense.
Moreover, businesses should adopt proactive incident response drills and collaborate with DDoS mitigation specialists to refine threshold-based scrubbing rules.
As the botnet continues to recruit vulnerable devices worldwide, security teams must remain vigilant and invest in robust mitigation frameworks to safeguard web-facing applications.
The record-setting 5.76 million-device attack serves as a wake-up call that adversaries can still harness massive distributed infrastructures, and only comprehensive, adaptive defenses can restore confidence in the availability of critical online services.
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