Massive HTTP DDoS Attack Hits Record High of 71 Million Requests/Second

Web infrastructure company Cloudflare disclosed that it prevented a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at over 71 million requests per second (RPS). It is the massive HTTP DDoS attack reported to date. It is 35% higher than the previous 46 million RPS DDoS attack that Google Cloud mitigated in June 2022.

Massive HTTP DDoS Attack Hits Record High of 71 Million Requests/Second

“The majority of attacks peaked in the ballpark of 50-70 million requests per second (RPS) with the largest exceeding 71 million,” the company said, calling it a “hyper-volumetric” DDoS attack.

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The company further revealed that the attacks singled out websites secured by its platform. Those attacks originated from a botnet comprising more than 30,000 IP addresses that belonged to “numerous” cloud providers.

Targeted websites included a popular gaming provider, cryptocurrency companies, hosting providers, and cloud computing platforms.

Such types of attacks send a tsunami of HTTP requests towards a target website. These attacks are large in number that the website can’t handle them. The development comes as the size, sophistication, and frequency of DDoS attacks are on the rise, with the company recording a 79% spike in HTTP DDoS attacks year-over-year in the final quarter of 2022.

DDoS attacks are also turning out to be a lucrative means for criminal actors to earn illicit revenues by demanding ransom payments from victims, usually in the form of Bitcoin, to stop and avoid disruption to their services.

Network-layer DDoS attacks singled out China, Lithuania, Finland, Singapore, Taiwan, Belgium, Costa Rica, the U.A.E, South Korea, and Turkey.

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