CloudFlare blocked a record HTTPs DDoS attack peaking at 15 rps

Cloudflare has mitigated a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 15.3 million request-per-second (RPS).

Cloudflare announced to have mitigated a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 15.3 million request-per-second (RPS), which is one of the largest HTTPS DDoS attacks blocked by the company.

The company blocked the attack earlier this month, the experts pointed out that HTTPS DDoS attacks are more expensive because require higher computational resources for establishing a secure TLS encrypted connection. On the other side, HTTPS DDoS attacks cost more to the victim to mitigate. 

“Earlier this month, Cloudflare’s systems automatically detected and mitigated a 15.3 million request-per-second (rps) DDoS attack — one of the largest HTTPS DDoS attacks on record.” reads the post published by CloudFlare. “We’ve seen very large attacks in the past over (unencrypted) HTTP, but this attack stands out because of the resources it required at its scale.”

The attack was launched by a botnet composed of approximately 6,000 unique bots that was monitored by Cloudflare experts and that was involved in other massive attacks that peaked at 10M rps.

The DDoS attack blocked by the company lasted less than 15 seconds and targeted an unnamed customer operating a crypto launchpad. Crypto launchpads are platforms for launching new coins, crypto projects, and raising liquidity.

Volumetric DDoS attacks are designed to overwhelm a target network/service with significantly high volumes of malicious traffic, which typically originate from a botnet under a threat actor’s control.

The analysis of the malicious traffic revealed that it mostly originated from data centers, it originated from 112 countries around the world. 15% of the malicious traffic originated from Indonesia, followed by Russia, Brazil, India, Colombia, and the United States.

“Within those countries, the attack originated from over 1,300 different networks. The top networks included the German provider Hetzner Online GmbH (Autonomous System Number 24940), Azteca Comunicaciones Colombia (ASN 262186), OVH in France (ASN 16276), as well as other cloud providers.” concludes the post.

In August, the web infrastructure and website security company announced that it has mitigated the largest ever volumetric distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack at the time. The malicious traffic reached a record high of 17.2 million requests-per-second (rps), a volume three times bigger than previously reported HTTP DDoS attacks. Be aware, that the attack that the company blocked in August was an HTTP DDoS and not an HTTPS one.

In November 2021, the company mitigated a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked just below 2 terabytes per second (Tbps), which is the largest attack Cloudflare has seen to date.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Cloudflare)