Averted DDoS attacks peak last year, could be surpassed by year-end

BleepingComputer reports that Cloudflare has thwarted 21.3 million distributed denial-of-service attacks last year, which is not only a 358% increase over 2023 but also the highest on record. However, even more DDoS intrusions are expected by the end of 2025, with 20.5 million attacks already averted during the first three months alone, according to Cloudflare's 2025 Q1 DDoS report. Network-layer DDoS attacks, which fueled much of the increase in incidents over the previous quarter, totaled 16.8 million between January and March, 6.6 million of which were aimed at Cloudflare's infrastructure as part of an 18-day DDoS campaign. Additional findings also showed 3,488% and 2,301% quarter-over-quarter increases in Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and Encapsulating Security Payload attacks, respectively. Such a report comes as Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince disclosed the mitigation of an almost 45-second DDoS attack that reached 5.8 terabits per second, exceeding the previous record-holding Mirai-based botnet-linked intrusion that peaked at 5.6 Tbps.