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

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.

The biggest DDoS attack to date was mitigated by Cloudflare recently. The attack compromised over 13,000 devices and the speed noted down was 5.6 terabits per second. The incident originated from a botnet based in Mirai and arose in October of 2024.

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.

DDoS attacks have only gotten more sophisticated as time goes on. An increasingly popular tactic among bad actors is to hit hard and fast in what are described as 'hypervolumetric' attacks. For instance,