Cloudflare on Tuesday stated it mitigated 7.3 million distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults within the second quarter of 2025, a major drop from 20.5 million DDoS assaults it fended off the earlier quarter.
“General, in Q2 2025, hyper-volumetric DDoS assaults skyrocketed,” Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco stated. “Cloudflare blocked over 6,500 hyper-volumetric DDoS assaults, a mean of 71 per day.”
In Q1 2025, the corporate stated an 18-day sustained marketing campaign towards its personal and different vital infrastructure protected by Cloudflare was accountable for 13.5 million of the assaults noticed in the course of the time interval. Cumulatively, Cloudflare has blocked almost 28 million DDoS assaults, surpassing the variety of assaults it mitigated in all of 2024.
The notable of the assaults in Q2 2025 is a staggering DDoS assault that peaked at 7.3 terabits per second (Tbps) and 4.8 billion packets per second (Bpps) inside a span of 45 seconds.
Huge site visitors spikes like these make headlines—however what typically will get missed is how attackers are actually combining them with smaller, focused probes. As a substitute of simply overwhelming methods with brute drive, they’re mixing large-scale floods with quiet scans to seek out weak spots and slip previous defenses constructed to dam solely the apparent.
Layer 3/Layer 4 (L3/4) DDoS assaults declined 81% quarter-over-quarter to three.2 million, whereas HTTP DDoS assaults rose 9% to 4.1 million. Greater than 70% of the HTTP DDoS assaults emanated from identified botnets. The commonest L3/4 assault vectors have been flood assaults performed over DNS, TCP SYN, and UDP protocols.
Telecommunication service suppliers and carriers have been among the many most focused, adopted by the Web, IT companies, gaming, and playing sectors.
China, Brazil, Germany, India, South Korea, Turkey, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Russia, and Azerbaijan emerged as probably the most attacked areas primarily based on the billing nation of the Cloudflare clients. Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Argentina, and Ukraine have been the highest 5 sources of DDoS assaults.
The online infrastructure and safety firm additionally revealed that the variety of hyper-volumetric DDoS assaults exceeding 100 million packets per second (pps) elevated by 592% in comparison with the earlier quarter.
One other vital facet is the 68% enhance in ransom DDoS assault, which happens when malicious actors try to extort cash from a corporation by threatening them with a DDoS assault. It additionally includes situations the place the assaults are carried out and a ransom is demanded to cease it from taking place once more.
“Whereas nearly all of DDoS assaults are small, hyper-volumetric DDoS assaults are growing in measurement and frequency,” Cloudflare stated. “Six out of each 100 HTTP DDoS assaults exceed 1M rps, and 5 out of each 10,000 L3/4 DDoS assaults exceed 1 Tbps — a 1,150% QoQ enhance.”
The corporate additional has referred to as consideration to a botnet variant dubbed DemonBot that infects Linux-based methods, predominantly unsecured IoT units, through open ports or weak credentials to enlist them right into a DDoS botnet that may perform UDP, TCP, and application-layer floods.
“Assaults are sometimes command-and-control (C2) pushed and might generate vital volumetric site visitors, typically concentrating on gaming, internet hosting, or enterprise companies,” it added. “To keep away from an infection, leverage antivirus software program and area filtering.”
An infection vectors like these exploited by DemonBot spotlight broader challenges with unsecured IoT publicity, weak SSH credentials, and outdated firmware—widespread themes throughout DDoS botnet proliferation. Associated assault methods, comparable to TCP reflection, DNS amplification, and burst-layer evasion, are more and more mentioned in Cloudflare’s application-layer risk experiences and API safety breakdowns.
