New record recorded at Cloudflare, this hosting and content distribution company. The company, which specializes in services protecting websites from all types of attacks, has just reported that it has blocked a major denial of service attack, one of its businesses. In an article published earlier this week, Cloudflare explains that it has hindered an attack exceeding 71 million requests per second.
This is a volume more than a third higher than the previous record, reported by Google in June 2022, of 46 million requests per second. The malicious action then targeted one of its clients. It was “like receiving all the daily queries to Wikipedia (one of the 10 most visited websites in the world) in just 10 seconds,” the Mountain View company explained at the time. Cloudflare also reported a massive attack around the same time that peaked at 17 million requests per second.
30,000 IP addresses
The latest giant denial of service attack observed by Cloudflare, which took place last weekend, was not isolated. A total of ten large-scale DDoS attacks were also countered. According to the company, these attacks, coming from more than 30,000 IP addresses, targeted a “popular game provider”, without further details, companies specializing in crypto-assets as well as hosting providers.
Denial of service attacks, a phenomenon on the increase according to Cloudflare, aim to saturate an internet service by overwhelming it with requests, thus making it unavailable or slow for legitimate users. This kind of attack is often cheap, while there are plenty of offerings – including Cloudflare’s – to protect against.
Video games, hacktivists, extortion
Denial of service attacks are also a popular tool for hacktivists, used to disrupt online video games, as evidenced by the operations carried out by Internet users from the Ukrainian IT Army or those of Killnet, a pro-Russian group. But we also observe their use in the context of extortion attempts. The LockBit gang had for example announced that it had added this kind of attack to its panel of malicious actions.
A modus operandi in the sights of American and European justice. They announced in mid-December new arrests as part of their Operation Power Off, a long-term action that targets service providers of denial of service attacks.