Cloudflare stops new world's largest DDoS attack over Labor Day weekend

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• The biggest, baddest DDoS attack to date was just fended off.
• The attack used the trivial, but nasty, UDP flood attack.
• You must protect yourself against DDoS attacks.

Over the Labor Day weekend, Cloudflare says it successfully stopped a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps). This came only a few months after Cloudflare blocked a then all-time high DDoS attack of 7.3 Tbps. This latest attack was almost 60% larger.

According to Cloudflare, the assault was the result of a hyper-volumetric User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood attack that lasted about 35 seconds. During that just more than half-minute attack, it delivered over 5.1 billion packets per second. 

This attack, Cloudflare reported, came from a combination of several IoT and ...