Cloudflare on Tuesday mentioned it mitigated 7.3 million distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults within the second quarter of 2025, a big drop from 20.5 million DDoS assaults it fended off the earlier quarter.
“Total, in Q2 2025, hyper-volumetric DDoS assaults skyrocketed,” Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco mentioned. “Cloudflare blocked over 6,500 hyper-volumetric DDoS assaults, a mean of 71 per day.”
In Q1 2025, the corporate mentioned an 18-day sustained marketing campaign towards its personal and different vital infrastructure protected by Cloudflare was liable 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.
Massive visitors spikes like these make headlines—however what usually will get missed is how attackers at the moment are combining them with smaller, focused probes. As a substitute of simply overwhelming techniques with brute pressure, they’re mixing large-scale floods with quiet scans to search out weak spots and slip previous defenses constructed to dam solely the plain.
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 most typical L3/4 assault vectors had been flood assaults performed over DNS, TCP SYN, and UDP protocols.
Telecommunication service suppliers and carriers had been among the many most focused, adopted by the Web, IT providers, gaming, and playing sectors.
China, Brazil, Germany, India, South Korea, Turkey, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Russia, and Azerbaijan emerged as essentially the most attacked places primarily based on the billing nation of the Cloudflare prospects. Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Argentina, and Ukraine had been the highest 5 sources of DDoS assaults.
The net 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 side is the 68% improve in ransom DDoS assault, which happens when malicious actors try and extort cash from a company by threatening them with a DDoS assault. It additionally entails situations the place the assaults are carried out and a ransom is demanded to cease it from occurring once more.
“Whereas the vast majority of DDoS assaults are small, hyper-volumetric DDoS assaults are rising in dimension and frequency,” Cloudflare mentioned. “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 improve.”
The corporate additional has referred to as consideration to a botnet variant dubbed DemonBot that infects Linux-based techniques, predominantly unsecured IoT gadgets, by way of 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 visitors, usually concentrating on gaming, internet hosting, or enterprise providers,” 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, equivalent to TCP reflection, DNS amplification, and burst-layer evasion, are more and more mentioned in Cloudflare’s application-layer risk reviews and API safety breakdowns.
