Bigger and badder: how DDoS attack sizes have evolved over the last decade

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are cyberattacks that aim to overwhelm and disrupt online services, making them inaccessible to users. By leveraging a network of distributed devices, DDoS attacks flood the target system with excessive requests, consuming its bandwidth or exhausting compute resources to the point of failure. These attacks can be highly effective against unprotected sites and relatively inexpensive for attackers to launch. Despite being one of the oldest types of attacks, DDoS attacks remain a constant threat, often targeting well-known or high traffic websites, services, or critical infrastructure. Cloudflare has mitigated over 14.5 million DDoS attacks since the start of 2024 — an average of 2,200 DDoS attacks per hour. (Our DDoS Threat Report for Q3 2024 contains additional related statistics).

If we look at the metrics associated with large attacks mitigated in the last 10 years, does the graph show a steady increase in an exponential curve that keeps getting steeper, especially over the last few years, or is it closer to linear growth? We found that the growth is not linear, but rather is exponential, with the slope dependent on the metric we are looking at.

Why is this question interesting? Simple. The answer Continue reading