Tsunami of junk traffic that broke DDoS records delivered by tiniest of botnets

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

A massive flood of malicious traffic that recently set a new distributed denial-of-service record came from an unlikely source. A botnet of just 5,000 devices was responsible, as extortionists and vandals continue to develop ever more powerful attacks to knock sites offline, security researchers said.

The DDoS delivered 26 million HTTPS requests per second, breaking the previous record of 15.3 million requests for that protocol set only seven weeks ago, Cloudflare Product Manager Omer Yoachimik reported. Unlike more common DDoS payloads such as HTTP, SYN, or SYN-ACK packets, malicious HTTPS requests require considerably more computing resources for the attacker to deliver and for the defender or victim to absorb.

4,000 times stronger

"We've seen very large attacks in the past over (unencrypted) HTTP, but this attack stands out because of the resources it required at its scale," Yoachimik wrote.

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