Record-breaking 5.6 Tbps DDoS attack and global DDoS trends for 2024 Q4
Welcome to the 20th edition of the Cloudflare DDoS Threat Report, marking five years since our first report in 2020.
Published quarterly, this report offers a comprehensive analysis of the evolving threat landscape of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks based on data from the Cloudflare network. In this edition, we focus on the fourth quarter of 2024 and look back at the year as a whole.
When we published our first report, Cloudflare’s global network capacity was 35 Terabits per second (Tbps). Since then, our network’s capacity has grown by 817% to 321 Tbps. We also significantly expanded our global presence by 65% from 200 cities in the beginning of 2020 to 330 cities by the end of 2024.
Using this massive network, we now serve and protect nearly 20% of all websites and close to 18,000 unique Cloudflare customer IP networks. This extensive infrastructure and customer base uniquely positions us to provide key insights and trends that benefit the wider Internet community.
In 2024, Cloudflare’s autonomous DDoS defense systems blocked around 21.3 million DDoS attacks, representing a 53% increase compared to 2023. On average, in 2024, Cloudflare blocked 4,870 Continue reading
The fall and rise of TikTok (traffic)
The United States ban on TikTok went into effect on January 19, 2025, and although service began to be restored after just 14 hours, it was only close to the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States that associated DNS traffic started to recover to closer to previous levels. In this post, we analyze the events of January 19 and 20, and what they meant for TikTok-related DNS traffic, but also other competitors (including their growth outside the US).
For context, we wrote an initial blog post about the TikTok ban on Sunday, January 19, 2025. The ban was part of the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act," proposed in Congress, which ordered ByteDance to divest due to alleged security concerns. The bill was signed into law by Congress and President Biden in April 2024, and was upheld by the Supreme Court on January 17, 2025.
Aggregated data from our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver shows — as we’ve posted on social media — that the TikTok shutdown in the US began to impact DNS traffic to TikTok-related domains on January 19, just after 03:30 UTC (22:30 ET on January Continue reading
IBGP Is the Better EBGP
Whenever I was explaining how one could build EBGP-only data center fabrics, someone would inevitably ask, “But could you do that with IBGP?”
TL&DR: Of course, but that does not mean you should.
Anyway, leaving behind the land of sane designs, let’s trot down the rabbit trail of IBGP-only networks.
NB510: CISA Says US Tech Inherently Insecure; AI Now Included in Google Workspace
Take a Network Break! Guest co-host John Burke joins Drew Conry-Murray for this week’s analysis of tech news. They discuss a string of serious vulnerabilities in Wavlink Wi-Fi routers, Fortinet taking a one-two security punch, and CISA director Jen Easterly calling out US hardware and software companies for being “inherently insecure.” Microsoft and Google put... Read more »Tech Bytes: Can SD-WAN Solve Latency Issues for Modern Applications? (Sponsored)
Traditional SD-WAN ensures that business-critical apps get the best-performing network path to deliver a good user experience and meet service levels. But as SaaS and cloud adoption increase, the best path across a WAN may not be enough. Techniques like WAN ops and legacy caching techniques may have worked for enterprise or private apps, but... Read more »Concise Link Descriptions in netlab Topologies (Part 1)
One of the goals we’re always trying to achieve when developing netlab features is to make the lab topologies as concise as possible1. Among other things, netlab supports numerous ways of describing links between lab devices, allowing you to be as succinct as possible.
A bit of a background first:
- In the end, netlab collects all links in the links list before starting the data transformation process.
- Every entry in the links list is a dictionary. That dictionary can contain link attributes and must contain a list of interfaces connected to the link.
- Every interface must have a node (specifying the lab device it belongs to) and could contain additional interface attributes.
TikTok ban takes hold: data reveals sharp traffic decline and rapid shift to alternatives
The United States ban on TikTok went into effect on January 19, 2025, and our data showed a clear impact starting after 03:30 UTC (10:30 PM ET on January 18, 2025). The ban was part of the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act," proposed in Congress, which ordered ByteDance to divest due to alleged security concerns. The bill was signed into law by Congress and President Biden in April 2024, and was upheld by the Supreme Court.
Aggregated data from our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver shows — as we’ve posted on X — that the TikTok shutdown in the US began to impact DNS traffic to TikTok-related domains on January 19, just after 03:30 UTC (22:30 ET on January 18). This includes DNS traffic not only for TikTok, but also for other ByteDance-owned platforms, such as the CapCut video editor. Traffic dropped by as much as 85% compared to the previous week and showed signs of further decline in the following hours.
Around that time, a message indicating the TikTok ban began appearing for US users.
Analyzing data from autonomous systems or networks, traffic from TikTok owner ByteDance’s network (AS396986) in the US Continue reading
From Python to Go 011. Parsing XML, JSON, And YAML Files.
Hello my friend,
This blog post is probably the first one, where we start doing more practical rather than foundational things in Python and Go (Golang). Up till now we were going through all possible data types as well as small steps how to deal with files. Today we’ll bring that all together and boost it with practical scenario of parsing data following the most popular data serialization techniques these days
Which Jobs Do Require Network Automation Skills?
For quite a while I’m trying to hire a good network automation engineer, who shall be capable to write applications in Python, which shall manage networking. The pay is good, so my understanding would be that the candidates’ level shall be good as well. My understanding is sadly far from reality as general skills in software development is poor. I was thinking multiple times, if people who passed my trainings would apply, they could have smashed it (provided they practice). Which means there are a lot of jobs out there, requiring good level of automation and software development skills. But they stay unfulfilled because there are no good candidates. It could be yours.
Boost yourself up!
We offer the following training programs Continue reading
InfraHub Schema Library
In my previous InfraHub introductory post, we covered installation and the basics of InfraHub. In this second post, let’s explore the ‘Schema Library’ provided by OpsMill, the team behind InfraHub. As mentioned in the previous post, InfraHub doesn’t include any user-defined schemas out of the box, so we need to create our own. However, the Schema Library repository offers a collection of schemas that we can easily import into InfraHub. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the Schema Library and how to use it.
If you are new to Infrahub and want to learn the basics of what it is and how to install it, feel free to check out my introductory post below.
Getting Started with Infrahub
If you’re in the network automation space or attended one of the last two Autocon events, you might have come across a new tool called ‘Infrahub’ from OpsMill
Suresh Vina
Recap on Schema
The way I think about schema is that it is a blueprint that defines the structure of your data. It specifies the nodes (like devices and interfaces), their attributes, and the relationships between them. This allows you to customize how you Continue reading
Hedge 255: Open Multi-perspective Issuance
One of the various attack surfaces in encryption is insuring the certificates used to share the initial set of private keys are not somehow replaced by an attacker. In systems where a single server or source is used to get the initial certificates, however, it is fairly easy for an attacker to hijack the certificate distribution process.
Henry Birge-Lee joins us on this episode of the Hedge to talk about extensions to existing certificate systems where a certificate is pulled from more than one source. You can find his article here.
HN764: Should You Pursue a Technical Leadership Role?
Do you think you have what it takes to be a manager? Should you go for it? Laura Santamaria, host of the Technically Leadership podcast, joins Ethan Banks to discuss those questions. They talk about the motivations for moving into a management role, the challenges of managing people, and the need to understand the business... Read more »Public Videos: Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Design
The initial videos of the Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Architectures webinar are now public. You can watch the Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Basics, Physical Fabric Design, and Layer-3 Fabrics sections without an ipSpace.net account.
N4N009: High-Speed Ethernet Lanes Explained
On today’s episode, we’re explaining high-speed Ethernet lanes at the request of listener Matthew. We cover lanes, channels, and their physical representation in networking – think actual cables. We explain both 40Gb and 100Gb technologies and compare them to Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP). We also have a discussion on standards and practical implications for... Read more »Lab: Level-1 and Level-2 IS-IS Routing
One of the recipes for easy IS-IS deployments claims that you should use only level-2 routing (although most vendors enable level-1 and level-2 routing by default).
What does that mean, and why does it matter? You’ll find the answers in the Optimize Simple IS-IS Deployments lab exercise.
Securely Deploying & Running Multiple Tenants on Kubernetes
As Kubernetes becomes the backbone of modern cloud native applications, organizations increasingly seek to consolidate workloads and resources by running multiple tenants within the same Kubernetes infrastructure. These tenants could be:
- Internal teams: Departments within a company that share a Kubernetes cluster for development and production.
- External clients: SaaS providers hosting customer workloads on shared infrastructure.
While multitenancy offers cost efficiency and centralized management, it also introduces security and operational challenges:
- How do you ensure strong isolation between tenants?
- How do you manage resources and prevent one tenant from affecting another?
- How do you meet regulatory and compliance requirements?
To address these concerns, practitioners have three primary options for deploying multiple tenants securely on Kubernetes.
How to Deploy Multiple Tenants on Kubernetes
Option 1: Namespace-Based Isolation with Network Policies, RBAC and Security Controls
Namespaces are Kubernetes’ built-in mechanism for logical isolation. This approach uses:
- Namespaces: Logical boundaries for separating tenant workloads.
- RBAC (role-based access control): Restricts tenant access to their namespace and resources.
- Network policies: Controls ingress and egress traffic between pods and namespaces.
- Resource quotas: Limits CPU, memory and other resources to prevent noisy neighbors.
Advantages:
- Cost-effective: Tenants share the cluster infrastructure.
- Simple to manage: Centralized operations within a Continue reading
NAN082: Mastering Python One Bite at a Time
How do you master Python? One bite at a time. On today’s show we talk with Bob Belderbos, co-founder of PyBites, a community and learning platform for Python. Bob shares his philosophy for learning Python in small bites with practical exercises, hands-on learning, and daily coding for improvement. We discuss the importance of small wins,... Read more »Comparing IGP and BGP Data Center Convergence
A Thought Leader1 recently published a LinkedIn article comparing IGP and BGP convergence in data center fabrics2. In it, they3 claimed that:
iBGP designs would require route reflectors and additional processing, which could result in slightly slower convergence.
Let’s see whether that claim makes any sense.
TL&DR: No. If you’re building a simple leaf-and-spine fabric, the choice of the routing protocol does not matter (but you already knew that if you read this blog).
HS092: Make a Plan…and Change It!
It’s better to plan for your IT strategy than not. But sometimes circumstances arise such that the plan, no matter how well conceived, just doesn’t work any more. On today’s Heavy Strategy, we explore how and why you should change a plan in the context of IT and business objectives. Sometimes this means small changes... Read more »