Cloudflare Mitigates Record-Breaking 3.8Tbps DDoS Attack in Massive Hacking Campaign
Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure provider, reported successfully mitigating a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 3.8Tbps. This surpasses the previous record, a 3.47Tbps DDoS attack that targeted Microsoft in November 2021. Both attacks were “volumetric” in nature, designed to overwhelm a website or app by consuming all available internet bandwidth and forcing the service offline.
The 3.8Tbps assault was part of a broader month-long hacking campaign that began in early September. The campaign included over 100 large-scale volumetric DDoS attacks, with many exceeding 3Tbps. Cloudflare was able to fend off the attack due to its extensive network of servers worldwide, which helped disperse the traffic generated by the botnet. The company’s real-time traffic analysis systems also played a key role in filtering out malicious data.
Though Cloudflare did not name specific victims, the company revealed that the DDoS campaign targeted multiple clients in sectors such as financial services, internet services, and telecommunications. Despite the intensity of the attack, Cloudflare’s defense systems handled the situation autonomously, preventing service disruptions.
The company traced the attack to a botnet composed of compromised internet devices, including Asus and MikroTik routers, DVRs, and web servers. These devices were hijacked to generate massive volumes of internet traffic and launch a DDoS attack. The botnet leveraged the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), a data transfer method that can be exploited for such attacks.
Cloudflare noted that many of the compromised devices originated from countries like Vietnam, Russia, Brazil, Spain, and the US. The hijacking of Asus routers was likely facilitated by a high-severity vulnerability disclosed earlier, which potentially affects 157,000 devices.
The incident highlights the ongoing threat posed by unpatched hardware, which can be exploited in large-scale cyberattacks.
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