Without really knowing it, the whole world has just suffered a DDoS attack like never before. Hackers have attempted to bring down tens of millions of machines. But the most amazing thing is that they ended up using only a very small amount of devices to carry out their attacks.
Last week, the internet nearly wobbled. Hackers have carried out an impressive campaign of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, recently translated by the commission for the enrichment of the French language as “collective attacks by service saturation“. Hackers have broken all records and if the protection giant Cloudflare managed to mitigate the attack, the company admits never having observed such a threat.
Thus, the hackers sent via their machines 26 million HTTPS requests per second, thus breaking the previous “record” which was 15.3 million. And yet, only 5,067 devices were used for this major operation.
This attack was mainly carried out via cloud service providers, showing that hackers have used large servers and virtual machines. Unlike a “classic” use of small connected devices, this method offers them unparalleled firepower.
Read also: DDoS attacks, their number broke all records in 2021
Over 212 million HTTPS requests in 30 seconds, a record
The attack lasted less than 30 secondsbut thus generated more than 212 million HTTPS requests, all distributed in 121 countries. Remember in passing that DDoS attacks can be measured according to different criteria: the number of requests sent per second (the case that concerns us here), the number of packets or the volume of data that pass through.
At the head of the states concerned, we find the USA, Brazil and Russia. And among the suppliers most affected, we find the French OVH, but also the Indonesian Telkomet or the North American iboss. About 3% of the attack went through the Tor network, which Dark Web users (but not only…) are familiar with.
For comparison, Cloudfare tracked another large attack that took place around the same time. Despite the 730,000 devices used (144 times more), this DDoS attack ultimately only managed to generate one million requests per second (23 times less).
Source : Cloudflare
