DDoS protection service Cloudflare has blocked yet another record-breaking DDoS attack, amounting to roughly 7.3 Tbps. For context, that’s the equivalent of downloading over 9,000 HD movies in just 45 seconds.
The attack targeted a Cloudflare customer, a hosting provider that uses its Magic Transit feature to defend its IP network. The attack lasted just 45 seconds, but delivered 37.4 terabytes of data, equivalent to flooding a network with more than 9,350 full-length HD movies or streaming 7,840 hours of HD video nonstop in the attack duration, as explained by Cloudflare.
The company added other metrics just to explain the sheer scale of the attack as well. In music, the attack equates to downloading 9.35 million songs in under a minute — music that’ll keep you busy for nearly 57 years. In terms of photos, imagine taking 12.5 million high-resolution photos, all in 45 seconds. If you were taking one photo every day, it’d take 4,000 years to capture them all.
The attack also carpet bombed an average of 21,925 destination ports of a single IP address owned and used by the targeted customer, peaking at 34,517 destination ports per second.
It was a multivector DDoS attack with 99.996 percent of the traffic coming as UDP floods. The remaining 0.004 percent, which accounted for only 1.3 GB of the attack traffic, was identified as a combination of QOTD reflection attacks, Echo reflection attack, NTP reflection attack, Mirai UDP flood attack, Portmap flood, and RIPv1 amplification attacks.
Origins of the attack are harder to trace as a total of 122,145 source IP addresses spanning 5,433 autonomous systems (AS) from 161 countries were involved. However, nearly half the attacking traffic originated from Brazil and Vietnam, each accounting for nearly a quarter of the total traffic. These were followed by Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Ukraine, Ecuador, Thailand, the United States, and Saudi Arabia.
This isn’t the first high-traffic attack Cloudflare has blocked. The company has previously fended off attacks reaching 6.5 Tbps and 4.8 billion packets per second.
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