There has been a surge in Internet traffic and DDoS attacks, and over time, the complexity of these attacks has been elevating. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, hackers are trying to find new and challenging ways to penetrate the network, as was witnessed by Cloudflare.
Massive DDoS attack on Cloudflare network
In late June, a four-day attack campaign was launched, involving more than 316,000 unique sending addresses, suggesting the count of victim bot devices.
Cloudflare researchers reported a DDoS attack that exceeded 400-600 million packets per second (Pps), and that peaked multiple times above 700 million packets per second (Mpps), with a top peak of 754 Mpps.
The attack employed a combination of three attack vectors over the TCP protocol: SYN floods, ACK floods, and SYN-ACK floods.
This packet-based volumetric DDoS attack attempted to jam Cloudflare's routers and data center appliances rather than flooding the in-bound data connections.
Recent volumetric DDoS attack
Volumetric DDoS attacks are the most common type of DDoS attack, and almost 65% of DDoS attacks are volumetric in nature.
In mid-June 2020, Akami disclosed that one of its client, a large European bank using Akami’s hosted infrastructure, was targeted by the largest ever packets per second DDoS attack. The attack grew to the traffic levels to 418 Gbps within a few seconds and touched the peak size of 809 Mpps in approximately two minutes.
In the same month, Amazon also disclosed that its AWS Shield service witnessed the largest DDoS attack, which maxed to the traffic of 2.3 Tbps in mid-February this year.
Recent DDoS trends
Cloudflare researchers have observed a decrease in the size and duration of the network-layer DDoS attacks in Q1 2020 as compared to Q4 2019.
Most recent DDoS attacks are localized, which implies that DDoS mitigation solutions also need to have widespread coverage across several geographical areas.