Cloudflare recently mitigated the largest-ever disclosed DDoS attack, which peaked at 3.8 terabits per second (Tbps). This massive attack was part of a broader campaign involving multiple hyper-volumetric Layer 3 and Layer 4 DDoS attacks that spanned over a month. These types of attacks flood network infrastructure or exhaust transport layer resources with high volumes of packets and connection requests.
Cloudflare’s defense systems automatically mitigated the attack using their global anycast network, which distributed the malicious traffic across their network to prevent any single server from being overwhelmed. Their system employed advanced filtering techniques, leveraging technologies like eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) to detect and block harmful traffic in real-time. As a result, the attack was neutralized in under two minutes, ensuring minimal disruption for the affected services.
This attack primarily targeted sectors like financial services, internet infrastructure, and telecommunications, with much of the traffic originating from compromised devices in countries like Vietnam, Russia, and Brazil​.
