Nothing induces anxiety in me quite like the term hypervolumetric DDoS attack.

DDoS attacks have evolved in sophistication over time. Recently, a prevalent strategy among malicious actors has been to strike swiftly with what are termed ‘hypervolumetric’ attacks. For instance, last October, an internet service provider in East Asia was bombarded by a botnet, reaching a staggering rate of 5.6 terabits per second.

According to Cloudflare’s quarterly DDoS threat report, the incident on October 29 stands as the largest attack of its kind ever reported (as noted by Bleeping Computer). The onslaught was orchestrated from a Mirai-based botnet consisting of 13,000 compromised devices, launching requests from approximately 5,500 unique IP addresses per second.

To break it down, Cloudflare disclosed, “The average contribution of each IP address per second was around 1 Gbps (~0.012% of 5.6 Tbps).”

Despite the staggering scale of this barrage, the entirety of the attack lasted merely 80 seconds. Naturally, Cloudflare seized the moment to highlight its capacities, stating that the attack was autonomously mitigated by its distributed defense systems.

The company revealed, “It required no human intervention, didn’t trigger any alerts, and didn’t cause performance degradation. The systems operated as designed.”

In summary, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) refers to cyber assaults launched from multiple sources aimed at rendering a targeted web service or device unusable for ordinary operations. For example, last year, Final Fantasy 14 was subjected to the largest scale DDoS attack it had encountered in a decade, leading to prolonged login queues.

Cloudflare’s latest DDoS threat report serves up a plethora of data worth noting. For instance, did you know that during the latter half of 2024, Indonesia remained the top origin of DDoS attacks?

The company also reports a rise in hypervolumetric DDoS attacks, showing a pronounced rise quarter on quarter through the winter of 2024. They noted, “The number of attacks surpassing 1 Tbps surged by 1,885% QoQ, while those exceeding 100 million packets per second jumped by 175% QoQ.”

Nevertheless, Cloudflare maintains that most HTTP and network-level DDoS attacks observed rarely exceeded 10 minutes—hence the push towards automated defense mechanisms. Cloudflare explains, “Given that the duration of most attacks is so brief, it is often impractical for a human to react to an alert, analyze the traffic, and implement mitigation.”