During a recent reporting period, 20.5 million Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were successfully thwarted, with 6.6 million of those specifically directed at Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Notably, gaming servers emerged as the primary targets of these attacks, impacting popular games such as Counter-Strike: GO, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. The intensity of these attacks is highlighted by a recent record.
The largest DDoS attack recorded during this timeframe peaked at an astonishing 5.6 terabits per second. However, this record was soon surpassed by a subsequent attack on April 24th, which was measured at a staggering 5.8 terabits per second. DDoS attacks involve a malicious entity overwhelming a service with an excessive number of requests, far beyond what the service can manage.
This flood of requests consumes all available resources, rendering the service inoperable and effectively taking it offline, thus making it inaccessible to legitimate users. The rise in both the frequency and scale of these attacks serves as a significant concern for cybersecurity, especially in sectors like gaming, where the impact can be particularly disruptive. As technology evolves, so too do the tactics of those who aim to exploit it, necessitating ongoing vigilance and robust defensive strategies from service providers and their infrastructure.
This content was originally published in our sister publication and has been translated from Swedish to reach a broader audience.