Cloudflare Thwarts Record-Setting 11.5 Tbps DDoS Attack, Lock Down Your IoT Devices Now

Cloudflare just announced on X that it blocked the highest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack in history, which was an 11.5 Terabits per second DDoS attack that came as a UDP (User Datagram Protocol) flood. It was brief, about 35 seconds long, but slammed resources at over 5.1 billion packets per second.

In UDP flood attacks, attackers send high amounts of fake UDP traffic to random ports on a targeted server. Because the server wastes resources checking and responding, it can quickly get overwhelmed and shut down. The thwarted attack was the largest ever seen, and interestingly, comes shortly after Cloudflare stopped a previous all-time high DDoS attack on its CDN network.

Cloudflare has proved efficient in thwarting sophisticated cyberattacks over time. In 2022, it stopped a massive crypto DDoS attack, which peaked at 15M requests per second. Since then, it has had to deal with more powerful assaults ...