Cloudflare has mitigated the biggest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on record. Here's what you need to know.

Cloudflare says the attack against an East Asian ISP came from 13,000 devices infected with a variant of the notorious Mirai malware.

Last week, security company Trend Micro said it also found an IoT botnet. The botnet, which is driven by variants of Mirai and a similar malware family known as Bashlite, has been delivering large-scale DDoSes since the end of last year, primarily to targets in Japan.

The biggest DDoS attack to date was mitigated by Cloudflare recently. The attack compromised over 13,000 devices and the speed noted down was 5.6 terabits per second. The incident originated from a botnet based in Mirai and arose in October of 2024.

The largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to date peaked at 5.6 terabits per second and came from a Mirai-based botnet with 13,000 compromised devices.

Cloudflare saw a 53% increase in DDoS attack frequency last year, when it blocked a record-breaking 5.6 Tbps attack.

DDoS attacks have only gotten more sophisticated as time goes on. An increasingly popular tactic among bad actors is to hit hard and fast in what are described as 'hypervolumetric' attacks. For instance,