Cloudflare, a network security provider, reported in its quarterly DDoS Threat Report that it detected and prevented nearly six million Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks during the third quarter of 2024. The company emphasized that many organizations still reactively implement DDoS protection only after experiencing an attack, leaving their networks vulnerable.
Cloudflare’s systems autonomously detected a significant increase in DDoS attacks, with 4.2 terabits per second (Tbps) attack on Oct. 21, which lasted just one minute. The company estimates that this year’s DDoS activity has reached 14.5 million attacks so far. (That is 4.5 million in Q1 and four million in Q2, and six million in Q3.)
“That’s an average of around 2,200 DDoS attacks every hour,” Cloudflare noted in its report.
The report highlighted a rise in hyper-volumetric attacks, with over 200 DDoS incidents exceeding 3 Tbps and 2 billion packets per second (Bpps). While most attacks are brief, there was a slight increase in longer-lasting attacks, with 7% lasting more than an hour—though these represented just 3% of the total.
Cloudflare attributed part of the surge in DDoS activity to increasing use of botnets by threat actors, possibly driven by geopolitical events and other global tensions.
“Our systems are constantly evolving to tackle these high-intensity attacks autonomously,” Cloudflare reported.