Slashdot: Cloudflare Stops New World’s Largest DDoS Attack Over Labor Day Weekend

Sep 3, 2025

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Source URL: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/09/03/1958250/cloudflare-stops-new-worlds-largest-ddos-attack-over-labor-day-weekend?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed
Source: Slashdot
Title: Cloudflare Stops New World’s Largest DDoS Attack Over Labor Day Weekend

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AI Summary and Description: Yes

Summary: Cloudflare successfully mitigated a record-breaking DDoS attack peaking at 11.5 Tbps, demonstrating the increasing sophistication of such attacks and the effectiveness of modern internet infrastructure defenses. The incident highlights the critical importance of real-time threat intelligence and automated defense mechanisms in protecting against large-scale DDoS threats.

Detailed Description: Over the Labor Day weekend, Cloudflare experienced a monumental challenge in the form of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that reached a peak bandwidth of 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps). This incident marks a significant milestone, as it is larger than a previous attack they had mitigated a few months prior, which was recorded at 7.3 Tbps.

Key insights from the attack include:

– **Nature of the Attack**:
– The DDoS attack was characterized as a hyper-volumetric User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood attack.
– The attack’s duration was relatively short, lasting around 35 seconds but was immensely powerful, sending out more than 5.1 billion packets per second.

– **Source of the Attack**:
– The assault was attributed to a collaboration of multiple IoT and cloud providers.
– Compromised accounts on Google Cloud were noted as a significant source, though the majority of the attack stemmed from other platforms.

– **Impact and Mitigation**:
– While the specific target of the attack remains undisclosed, it was aimed at overwhelming the victim’s network infrastructure, thereby disrupting services.
– Cloudflare effectively neutralized the DDoS threat in real time through its automated defenses, with no notable disruption to customer services or need for manual intervention.

– **Implications for Security Professionals**:
– This incident underscores the escalating sophistication of DDoS attack methodologies, which increasingly harness compromised resources from various cloud providers.
– The successful mitigation by Cloudflare emphasizes the need for robust real-time threat detection systems and the integration of advanced techniques such as packet analysis and threat intelligence sharing.

This event serves as a critical reminder for security and compliance professionals about the importance of strengthening DDoS defenses in their network infrastructure and the necessity of preparing for large-scale attacks that leverage the expansive resources of IoT and cloud computing environments. Ensuring resilience through automated systems and real-time data analysis is paramount in defending against future threats.

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