DDoS threat report for 2023 Q4
Jan 9, 2024Omer Yoachimik, Jorge Pacheco
Summary
This post details the evolution of DDoS attack trends observed in Q4 2023 and throughout the year. It highlights a significant increase in network-layer DDoS attacks (117% YoY) and a decrease in HTTP DDoS attacks (20% YoY). It also details specific attack patterns related to geopolitical events (Israel-Hamas conflict, Taiwan tensions) and major conferences (COP 28). A key technical contribution discussed is the mitigation of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks exploiting an HTTP/2 vulnerability, including the largest attack ever seen by Cloudflare (201 million rps). The post also quantifies the volume of mitigated HTTP and network-layer attacks, and analyzes attack targets by industry and region.
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