Cloudflare thwarts 17.2M rps DDoS attack — the largest ever reported

In August 2021, Cloudflare's autonomous edge DDoS protection systems detected and mitigated a 17.2 million request-per-second (rps) DDoS attack, the largest HTTP DDoS attack ever seen by the company. The attack was launched by a powerful botnet targeting a financial industry customer of Cloudflare. The traffic originated from over 20,000 bots in 125 countries worldwide. This specific botnet has been observed twice within a few weeks, attacking different Cloudflare customers with varying intensity. Additionally, Mirai-based DDoS attacks have increased by 88% and 9% for L3/4 and L7 attacks respectively in July alone. The rise of these powerful botnets highlights the need for automated, always-on protection against such threats.