In addition to the attack’s size, the use of HTTPS rather than typical HTTP requests further complicated the issue—the secure protocol results in more resource overhead due…
What just happened? Earlier this week, Cloudflare engineers identified one of the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks ever attempted. The attack, made against an unidentified cryptocurrency platform, was identified and mitigated in under 20 seconds. The individuals behind the act flooded the network with more than 15 million requests. In addition to the attack’s size, the use of HTTPS rather than typical HTTP requests further complicated the issue—the secure protocol results in more resource overhead due to the compute-intensive nature of the secure HTTPS request. According to Cloudflare, the botnet responsible for carrying out the attack represented 6,000 bots from 112 countries around the world. The attack is believed to have leveraged servers from hosting providers running vulnerable Java-based applications.
