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In a chilling escalation of cyber warfare, Cloudflare has revealed it successfully mitigated a 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack, the largest in recorded history.
The traffic surge is equivalent to streaming over 9,000 HD movies simultaneously all directed at a single, unsuspecting target.
The attackers launched a UDP flood, bombarding every possible port.
Since UDP (User Datagram Protocol) doesn’t require a handshake or listening port confirmation, it’s perfect for overwhelming systems quickly.
“Fast, messy, and hard to stop,” said a Cloudflare engineer.
Making things worse, hackers used reflection attacks, where they spoofed the victim’s IP to trick other servers into responding unknowingly helping to amplify the chaos.
Vulnerable services like NTP (Network Time Protocol), QOTD (Quote of the Day), and Echo were exploited, turning harmless servers into weapons.
The trend is alarming. Just three years ago, the largest known attack was 3.4 Tbps, aimed at Microsoft in 2022. The leap to 7.3 Tbps shows how fast DDoS capabilities are evolving.
Experts blame the rise of cheap, rented botnets and improved attack automation. With thousands of compromised devices acting together, attacks now launch faster, scale wider, and adapt on the fly.
Cloudflare says no customer data was compromised, but the event is a wake-up call for the industry: the next digital war may not be waged with viruses but with volume.
