Cloudflare reports a significant surge in DDoS attacks, with a record 21.3 million attacks mitigated in 2024
marking a 358% increase year-over-year and a 198% rise quarter-over-quarter. As of Q1 2025, the company has already dealt with 20.5 million DDoS attempts, including 6.6 million attacks targeting Cloudflare's own infrastructure during an 18-day multi-vector campaign.
These attacks, including SYN floods, Mirai botnet-generated DDoS, and SSDP amplification, contributed to a sharp 509% YoY rise in network-layer attacks.
Hyper-volumetric attacks also grew, with over 700 instances exceeding 1 Tbps bandwidth or 1 billion packets per second, averaging eight daily during Q1 2025. New threats emerged in Q1, including Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP) and Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) reflection/amplification attacks, which saw massive growth of 3,488% and 2,301%, respectively.
Gaming servers, notably those for Counter-Strike GO and Team Fortress 2, were among the primary targets, with one hyper-volumetric attack reaching 1.5 billion packets per second, though Cloudflare mitigated it successfully.
Cloudflare's CEO, Matthew Prince, revealed that the company recently mitigated a record-breaking 5.8 Tbps DDoS attack, surpassing the previous 5.6 Tbps record. This attack, lasting 45 seconds, tested the attacker’s infrastructure, and Prince teased an even larger attack on the same day, promising further details soon.
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