DDoS deluge: Brit biz battered as botnet blitzes break records

Cloudflare says DDoS crews ended 2025 by pushing traffic floods to new extremes, while Britain made an unwelcome leap of 36 places to become the world's sixth-most targeted location.

The Q4 stats confirm it was a lively year for traffic floods, with Cloudflare claiming it had to swat away 47.1 million DDoS attacks, more than double 2024's count. Momentum picked up toward the end of the year, as Q4 volumes jumped 31 percent from the prior quarter and 58 percent over 2024.

Aisuru-Kimwolf, a botnet made up largely of malware-infected Android TVs, was behind the largest blast of the quarter, pushing traffic to a record-breaking 31.4 Tbps. The campaign, dubbed "The Night Before Christmas," kicked off on December 19 and targeted Cloudflare customers as well as Cloudflare's own dashboard and infrastructure in parallel.

"As the number of attacks increased over the course of 2025 ...