In October 2024, a very powerful cyberattack was launched. This attack was a type of DDoS attack. DDoS means “Distributed Denial of Service,” where hackers use many devices to overwhelm a website or service and make it unavailable. Think of it like thousands of people trying to walk through a small door at the same time—it causes a traffic jam, and nobody can get through.
This particular attack was extremely big—it was recorded at 5.6 terabits per second. To give you an idea, that’s an enormous amount of internet traffic being used to disrupt a service. The attack targeted an internet company in East Asia. The hackers used a tool called Mirai, which is a type of malware. This malware takes over devices like cameras or routers, and in this case, it controlled around 13,000 devices to launch the attack.
The attack lasted for only 80 seconds, but it was so powerful that it set a record. According to Cloudflare January 21, 2025 , which helps protect websites from attacks like these, managed to stop it without any disruption to the service. This attack was part of a larger trend. In the last few months, Cloudflare has noticed a sharp increase in these kinds of attacks. In just one quarter, they stopped almost 7 million attacks. Some of these attacks were smaller, but many were very large, with over 420 of them being bigger than 1 terabit per second. This shows how cyberattacks are getting more frequent and more dangerous.
Information security specialist, currently working as risk infrastructure specialist & investigator.
15 years of experience in risk and control process, security audit support, business continuity design and support, workgroup management and information security standards.
