Cloudflare mitigated the largest recorded DDoS attack in history—a 7.3 Tbps assault targeting a financial institution, surpassing the previous 3.47 Tbps record. Key details:
- Attack Composition: Primarily UDP reflection/amplification (DNS, NTP, CLDAP) + TCP SYN floods
- Geographic Spread: 190+ countries, with 40% of traffic originating from cloud providers
- Defense Strategy:
- Edge-based ML filtering dropped malicious packets in <3ms
- Anycast rerouting distributed load across 300+ PoPs
- Stateful TCP Challenge mitigated SYN floods without CAPTCHAs
The attack lasted 37 minutes, but zero customer downtime occurred. Cloudflare warns multi-vector mega-attacks are becoming the norm
