DDoS attack traffic surged in 2023, Cloudflare finds​

Distributed denial of service attacks hit an all-time high in 2023, more than doubling year over year in the fourth quarter, Cloudflare said Tuesday in a threat report. The record high year for DDoS attacks coincided with mass exploits of the novel zero-day vulnerability HTTP/2 Rapid Reset, which threat actors used to launch DDoS attacks that broke records during the third quarter of 2023.

Massive DDoS attacks require significantly fewer capabilities, resources and time, according to Omer Yoachimik, senior product manager of DDoS protection and security reporting at Cloudflare. “In 2019, to launch an attack that reaches 3 million requests per second, you’d need at least a million IoT bots,” Yoachimik said via email. “Today, in 2024, to launch attacks that easily exceed 100 million requests per second, you only need 5,000 to 20,000 virtual machines.” “Generative AI tools also help to improve scripts and execute more sophisticated attacks,” he said.

Cloudflare said it mitigated more than 5.2 million HTTP DDoS attacks consisting of more than 26 trillion requests in 2023. While that’s a 20% decline compared to 2022 levels, mitigated network-layer DDoS attacks surged 85% to 8.7 million incidents in 2023, the company said. “On average, our systems auto-mitigated 996 network-layer DDoS attacks and 27 terabytes every hour,” Cloudflare said in the report. “The number of network-layer DDoS attacks in 2023 Q4 increased by 175% year over year and 25% quarter over quarter.”

Cybersecurity Dive 01/09/2024