DDoS Attacks Soar 53% To 21.3 Million, Cloudflare Reports

Cloudflare blocked 21.3 million DDoS attacks in 2024, including a record-breaking 5.6 terabit-per-second strike that targeted an Asian internet service provider last October. The yearly total marked a 53% increase from 2023.

The 80-second October attack, which originated from over 13,000 compromised Internet of Things devices running Mirai malware variant, highlighted an alarming trend: hyper-volumetric attacks exceeding 1 terabit per second grew by 1,885% in the fourth quarter compared to the previous quarter. Ransom DDoS attacks, where criminals threatened organizations with service disruptions unless paid, rose 78% in the same period.

When the first AI backtrace tools come online...

[zurkeyon]

There are going to be some people in some very serious trouble, on the hook for trillions in losses. Hope they know the phrase "There is always somebody better" ;-)

Need new laws

[Hoi Polloi]

Providers who have a significant number of compromised systems in their IP blocks should be threatened with being blocked unless they block those IPs.

Re:

[Tablizer]

The new administration should focus on laws punishing sloppy IOT companies instead of renaming geography and harassing transgenders.

Re: Need new laws

[drinkypoo]

Trump can't even talk and think at the same time. When the teleprompter stops he either gabbles randomly, rants incoherently, or in the best case just stands there and complains about it not working.

Re:

[Fly Swatter]

It's now "walk and text..." try to keep up.

Re:

[Bert64]

A lot of ISPs especially in developing countries are forced to use CGNAT due to lack of legacy address space. It was first come first served, and the countries which developed fastest got the lions share.

These countries tend not to (yet) have legislation requiring ISPs to identify users in the event of illegal activity, so they don't log the traffic going through the CGNAT gateways as this becomes extremely expensive.
As such, traffic which originates on an end user line and passes through a CGNAT gateway be

MICROS~1 Windows strikes again :o

[Mirnotoriety]

DDoS attacks soar fifty three percent to twenty one million. The primary cause being all those compromised Microsoft Windows desktops out there on the Internet.

AI scraping?

[zkiwi34]

Just a hypothesis.. How much of apparent new DDoS could be AI scraping data as fast as it can as frequently as it can?

Re:

[CEC-P]

I've heard some numbers from site operators. This is what that is. It's over 90% of their traffic and growing.

Re:

[Fly Swatter]

All normal traffic eventually drowned out by bots, who could have imagined?

Net neutrality needs an adjustment to allow human prioritization. All bot or automated traffic including ads should be de-prioritized, call me a botist all you want just don't confuse me with a botanist.

Newsflash: Cloudflare hype makes them money

[ihadafivedigituid]

Who knows if the reports they publish are bullshit or not? Having had some experience with their (unsolicited) sales weasels, I wouldn't believe a word they say.