Welcome to the 20th edition of the Cloudflare DDoS Threat Report, marking five years since our first report in 2020. Published quarterly, this report offers a comprehensive analysis of the evolving threat landscape of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks based on data from the Cloudflare network. In this edition, we focus on the fourth […]
Tag Archives: ddos
Global elections in 2024: Internet traffic and cyber threat trends
Elections define the course of democracies (even as there are several types of democracies), and 2024 was a landmark year, with over 60 countries — plus the European Union — holding national elections, impacting half the world’s population. As highlighted in Pew Research’s global elections report, this was a year of “political disruption,” where the […]
From deals to DDoS: exploring Cyber Week 2024 Internet trends
In 2024, Thanksgiving (November 28), Black Friday (November 29), and Cyber Monday (December 2) significantly impacted Internet traffic, similar to trends seen in 2023 and previous years. This year, Thanksgiving in the US drove a 20% drop in daily traffic compared to the previous week, with a notable 33% dip at 15:45 ET. In contrast, […]
Bigger and badder: how DDoS attack sizes have evolved over the last decade
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are cyberattacks that aim to overwhelm and disrupt online services, making them inaccessible to users. By leveraging a network of distributed devices, DDoS attacks flood the target system with excessive requests, consuming its bandwidth or exhausting compute resources to the point of failure. These attacks can be highly effective […]
Exploring Internet traffic shifts and cyber attacks during the 2024 US election
Elections are not just a matter of casting ballots. They depend on citizens being able to register to vote and accessing information about candidates and the election process, which in turn depend on the strength and security of the Internet. Despite the risks posed by potential cyberattacks aimed to disrupt democracy, Cloudflare did not observe […]
4.2 Tbps of bad packets and a whole lot more: Cloudflare's Q3 DDoS report
Welcome to the 19th edition of the Cloudflare DDoS Threat Report. Released quarterly, these reports provide an in-depth analysis of the DDoS threat landscape as observed across the Cloudflare network. This edition focuses on the third quarter of 2024. With a 296 Terabit per second (Tbps) network located in over 330 cities worldwide, Cloudflare is […]
How Cloudflare auto-mitigated world record 3.8 Tbps DDoS attack
Since early September, Cloudflare’s DDoS protection systems have been combating a month-long campaign of hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks. Cloudflare’s defenses mitigated over one hundred hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks throughout the month, with many exceeding 2 billion packets per second (Bpps) and 3 terabits per second (Tbps). The largest attack peaked 3.8 Tbps — the largest […]
How the Harris-Trump US presidential debate influenced Internet traffic
Much has changed in the 2024 United States presidential election since the June 27 debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, then the presumptive nominees for the November election. Now, over two months later, on September 10, the debate was between Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. In this post, […]
What is DDoSing
Nowadays, the term DDoS — or Distributed Denial of Service — raises the heart rate of most webmasters. Though many don’t know exactly what DDoSing is, they might be familiar with the effects of getting DDoSed: an extremely sluggish, dysfunctional, or entirely shut down website. In this article, we’ll define DDoSing, discuss the most common […]
How to Stop a DDoS Attack in 5 Steps
As a webmaster, keeping your site online during large traffic spikes is what you strive for. But how can you be sure traffic spikes are legitimate? And more importantly, how do you react when they aren’t? The unfortunate reality is DDoS attacks can be a threat for websites big and small. In this post, we’ll […]
