Cloudflare has mitigated the biggest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on record. Here's what you need to know.

The largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to date peaked at 5.6 terabits per second and came from a Mirai-based botnet with 13,000 compromised devices.

Cloudflare says the attack against an East Asian ISP came from 13,000 devices infected with a variant of the notorious Mirai malware.

Halloween 2024 was the worst ever Cloudflare’s autonomous DDoS defence systems thwarted approximately 21.3 million DDoS attacks in 2024, a significant 53 per cent increase from 2023. According to the company’s latest report,

The biggest DDoS attack to date was mitigated by Cloudflare recently. The attack compromised over 13,000 devices and the speed noted down was 5.6 terabits per second. The incident originated from a botnet based in Mirai and arose in October of 2024.

Despite encountering the largest-ever DDoS to date, Cloudflare claimed that the majority (63%) of HTTP DDoS attacks did not exceed 50,000 requests per second, while most (93%) network-layer attacks did not exceed 500Mbps and 87% did not exceed 50,000 pps.

Last week, security company Trend Micro said it also found an IoT botnet. The botnet, which is driven by variants of Mirai and a similar malware family known as Bashlite, has been delivering large-scale DDoSes since the end of last year, primarily to targets in Japan.

Cloudflare blocked a 5.6 Tbps DDoS attack from a Mirai botnet, with 1+ Tbps attacks surging 1,885% in Q4 2024.

Cloudflare saw a 53% increase in DDoS attack frequency last year, when it blocked a record-breaking 5.6 Tbps attack.

The largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack peaked at 5.6 terabits per second and was carried out by a Mirai-based botnet with 13,000 infected

DDoS attacks have only gotten more sophisticated as time goes on. An increasingly popular tactic among bad actors is to hit hard and fast in what are described as 'hypervolumetric' attacks. For instance,