Cloudflare fended off around 4.5 million DDoS attacks in the first quarter of this year. The proportion of DNS-based attacks is the most prominent attack vector.

Cloudflare releases the 17th edition of its DDoS Threat Report for the first quarter of 2024. It contains the most important findings in the area Distributed denial of serviceAttacks (DDoS) observed on the Cloudflare network. Cloudflare’s automated defense system has stopped 4.5 million DDoS attacks to date. The number of DNS-based DDoS attacks has increased by 80 percent, but this has no impact on the distribution of the different types of attacks. Additionally, the Cloudflare system stopped the Mirai botnet, which represents the largest attack on Cloudflare systems to date.

DDoS offensive

One of the first findings from the DDoS threat report is that Cloudflare’s automated defenses have prevented 4.5 million DDoS attacks to date. This represents a 50 percent increase over the previous year and represents 32 percent of all DDoS attacks the company has mitigated through 2023.

Increase in DNS attacks

Cloudflare recently launched a new DDoS mitigation system that Advanced DNS protectionSystem that complements your existing systems. According to Cloudflare, it is designed to protect against the most advanced DNS-based DDoS attacks, which have become the main attack vector. In the first quarter of 2024, the proportion of such DDoS attacks increased by 80 percent compared to the previous year and is now at 54 percent.

Although DNS-based DDoS attacks have increased, the distribution of each attack type remains roughly the same compared to the last quarter of 2023. HTTP DDoS attacks account for 37 percent, DNS-based attacks account for 33 percent, and the remaining 30 percent are taken over by all other types of L3/4 attacks, such as: B. SYN floods and UDP floods.

Mirai botnet

The largest attack Cloudflare has fended off so far in 2024 was launched by a Mirai-variant botnet. The attack, which peaked at 2 Tbps, targeted an Asian hosting provider protected by Cloudflare Magic Transit. Cloudflares systems automatically detected and mitigated this attack.