Botnet Generates One of the Largest DDoS Attacks on Record

Last month, someone attempted to launch one of the largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on record to take down a financial website, according to Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure provider.

The attack involved generating a flood of internet traffic via HTTP browser-based requests. At its peak, the bombardment reached 17.2 million requests per second.

“For perspective on how large this attack was: Cloudflare serves over 25 million HTTP requests per second on average,” the company wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “So peaking at 17.2 million rps, this attack reached 68% of our Q2 average rps rate of legitimate HTTP traffic.” In total, the attack bombarded the company’s servers with 330 million requests in less than one minute. However, Cloudflare says its automated systems were able to automatically detect and mitigate the flood of traffic.