Massive 11.5 Tbps UDP Flood DDoS Attack Originated From Google Cloud

Cloudflare disclosed that its automated defenses intercepted and neutralized a record-shattering Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) assault peaking at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps).

The attack, characterized as a hyper-volumetric UDP flood, lasted just 35 seconds but set a new industry high for network bandwidth consumed by malicious traffic.

Detailed analysis from Cloudflare shows that the majority of the attack traffic was staged through compromised resources on the Google Cloud Platform.

Cloudflare’s security telemetry captured a sudden spike from negligible background noise to more than 11 Tbps in under 10 seconds.

Within moments, the company’s automated mitigation systems identified the abnormal flow of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets and applied targeted rate-limiting rules and IP-based filtering to choke off the traffic surge.

A graphic shared by Cloudflare revealed the striking lifecycle of the attack: a steep ascent to peak volume, followed by an immediate descent as defenses took effect ...