Cloudflare reports that it has thwarted the largest DDoS attack ever publicly disclosed

Insecure IoT devices are leading to increasingly large-scale attacks

As the number of vulnerable or poorly secured IoT devices connected to the Internet continues to grow, the scale of DDoS attacks is also increasing. The more devices that can be enslaved as part of IoT botnets, the more packets per second and bandwidth can be generated. This can also be combined with reflection and amplification techniques that allow certain protocols.

In 2016, one of the Internet’s first IoT botnets called Mirai was responsible for an attack on the French cloud computing company OVH that reached a peak of 620 Gbps, making it the largest DDoS attack to date. That was a sign of the future.

As companies began moving their infrastructure to the cloud and the number of IoT botnets replicating Mirai increased, so did the scale of DDoS attacks. In 2018, the GitHub repository was the target of a DDoS attack at 1.3 Tbit/s, while in 2020 AWS fended off an attack that peaked at 2.3 Tbit/s. In 2021, Microsoft Azure was the target of a DDoS attack with a peak speed of 3.47 Tbit/s.