Internet security company Cloudflare has announced that it has repelled a record-breaking DDoS attack. One of its customers received 7.3 Tbps of unwanted traffic, totaling 37.4 TB.
The attackers used several attack vectors, mainly through the UDP protocol, which is faster than the usual TCP used by most Internet traffic. UDP is preferred when it comes to real-time responsiveness of programs like streaming video or online gaming. It does not wait for two devices on the Internet to coordinate their actions, sending data without acknowledgment of acceptance. Because of this, UDP flood attacks are one of the most common DDoS tools. Infographic from The Cloudflare Blog says that this volume is roughly equal to 9,350 HD movies, more than 9 million songs or 12.5 million photos — transmitted in just 45 seconds.
Reflection/amplification attacks were also used, in addition to the main one. Such an attack spoofs the target’s IP address and then requests information from a third party that responds to the victim’s address. If the attacker sends enough requests, they can overload the target IP address without proper protection.
Unfortunately, this is not the first case of a record-breaking DDoS attack in recent times. In January 2022, Microsoft suffered a record-breaking DDoS attack of 3.47 Tbps, and in October 2024, this figure was surpassed by a 5.6 Tbps attack on an Internet provider in East Asia. In April 2025, there was another large-scale attack with a speed of 6.5 Tbps, which lasted almost 49 seconds. In early 2024 ITC.ua suffered a DDoS attack.
For DDoS, attackers often use botnets of tens or even hundreds of thousands of devices, andSometimes the most unexpected ones. This is a relatively cheap and easy way to overwhelm the target’s defenses, which is used to create obstacles in the victim’s activities and sometimes even to extort money.
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