Hosting services company Cloudflare has faced the largest DDoS attack ever recorded. The hackers targeted several cryptocurrency sites, video game companies and cloud providers.
To believe that the hackers are launching a challenge. February 12, Cloudflare hosting services company had to contain the largest denial of service attack – also called DDoS – ever recorded. About ten operations were launched, most peaking between 50 and 70 million requests per second, with a peak at 71 million.
DDoS attacks are carried out in waves of connections directed simultaneously to a specific site. If the number of requests is high enough, the server is no longer able to process them, and the targeted platform breaks down.
Hackers use tens of thousands of infected computer objects to divert the connection to the target in question. This weekend’s attack came from over 30,000 IP addresses. Several cryptocurrency sites, video game companies and cloud providers have been targeted. DDoS attacks are sometimes one step in a larger operation to steal data. The hackers start by creating chaos before looking for another loophole.
More frequent attacks
This wave of attacks was much larger than previous campaigns recorded: in June 2022, Google recorded 46 million requests per second, during a similar operation.
Cloudflare notes that the frequency, size, and sophistication of DDoS attacks have steadily increased in recent years. The number of such operations nearly doubled in 2022 compared to 2021. According to Cloudflare, the attacks do not appear to be related to Russian hacktivist campaigns against the West. The authors are still unknown.
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