Cloudflare, a company that provides web security and infrastructure, recently reported that it stopped a huge cyber attack.

This attack reached a record high of 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps). It was a type of attack called a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, specifically a UDP flood. Most of the attack came from compromised resources on the Google Cloud Platform.

The company’s automated defense systems detected and neutralized the hyper-volumetric attack, which, despite its immense size, lasted for only about 35 seconds.

An image shared by Cloudflare detailed the attack’s brief but powerful lifecycle, showing a rapid spike to 11.5 Tbps before being brought under control.

Cloudflare confirmed its systems “autonomously detected and mitigated” the threat, highlighting the critical role of automated defenses in combating modern cyberattacks that can materialize and vanish in minutes.

This record-shattering event is not an isolated incident. According to Cloudflare, its security infrastructure has been under intense pressure over the past few weeks, having blocked “hundreds of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks.”

Among these was another significant assault that registered 5.1 billion packets per second (Bpps), demonstrating the diverse and persistent nature of the threats targeting online services.

A UDP (User Datagram Protocol) flood is a type of DDoS attack where the attacker overwhelms a target server with a massive number of UDP packets.

Because UDP is a “connectionless” protocol, the server can be quickly exhausted as it attempts to process and respond to each incoming packet, eventually rendering it unable to handle legitimate traffic.

The origination of such a large-scale attack from a major public cloud provider like Google Cloud highlights a persistent challenge in the cybersecurity landscape.

Malicious actors often exploit the vast resources and scalability of cloud platforms to build powerful botnets, capable of launching attacks with a magnitude that would be difficult to achieve with traditional hardware.

Cloudflare has indicated that a more detailed technical analysis of the attack will be provided in an upcoming report.

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