Cloudflare has mitigated the biggest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on record. Here's what you need to know.

Cloudflare saw a 53% increase in DDoS attack frequency last year, when it blocked a record-breaking 5.6 Tbps attack.

Cloudflare blocked a 5.6 Tbps DDoS attack from a Mirai botnet, with 1+ Tbps attacks surging 1,885% in Q4 2024.

Last week, security company Trend Micro said it also found an IoT botnet. The botnet, which is driven by variants of Mirai and a similar malware family known as Bashlite, has been delivering large-scale DDoSes since the end of last year, primarily to targets in Japan.

Despite encountering the largest-ever DDoS to date, Cloudflare claimed that the majority (63%) of HTTP DDoS attacks did not exceed 50,000 requests per second, while most (93%) network-layer attacks did not exceed 500Mbps and 87% did not exceed 50,000 pps.

The largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to date peaked at 5.6 terabits per second and came from a Mirai-based botnet with 13,000 compromised devices.

Cloudflare says the attack against an East Asian ISP came from 13,000 devices infected with a variant of the notorious Mirai malware.