Since last fall, Cloudflare has been battling an explosion of DDoS (Denial of Service) attacks. In its relentless fight, the American giant blocked a 5.6 terabits per second attack in October. According to Cloudflare, it was the most powerful DDoS attack of all time. Brief and intense, the attack relied on a botnet inspired by Mirai, a famous malware that appeared on the web more than ten years ago.
A few months later, the hackers struck even harder. In a statement sent to 01net, Cloudflare indicated that it had recorded an even more powerful DDoS attack. It is "larger than any that have been made public on the Internet to date". The attack was recorded and mitigated in the middle of last month.
A cyberattack of unprecedented power
The cyberattack reached a throughput of 7.3 terabits per second (Tbps), 12% more than the previous record set by Cloudflare. The company explains that it had observed an attack of 6.5 Tbps just a few weeks earlier. This unit is used to measure the volume of digital data. In the context of a DDoS attack, it indicates the mass of data transferred to a site's servers to saturate them.
The record attack of 7.3 terabits per second sent 37.4 terabytes of data through the targeted servers. That's likesending over 9,000 high-definition movies, a year of non-stop videos, or 9 million songs, in 45 seconds. The cyberattack originated from "more than 122,145 IP addresses" in 161 countries. Cloudflare notes that the attack is also more powerful than the recent attack on KrebsOnSecurity, Brian Krebs' independent cybersecurity news site, which suffered a DDoS attack of more than 6.3 terabits of data per second in May. The company says the record-breaking cyberattack targeted "a Cloudflare customer, a hosting provider." Hosting providers are increasingly in the crosshairs of DDoS attacks, Cloudflare notes in a blog post. Between January and February 2025, more than 13.5 million attacks were launched against web infrastructure and hosting providers using Cloudflare protections.
During 2025, Cloudflare has already mitigated a multitude of DDoS attacks against its customers' servers. During the first quarter, more than 20 million denial-of-service attacks were blocked worldwide.
Source: Cloudflare
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