No Humans Involved: Mitigating a 754 Million PPS DDoS Attack Automatically


On June 21, Cloudflare automatically mitigated a highly volumetric DDoS attack that peaked at 754 million packets per second. The attack was part of an organized four day campaign starting on June 18 and ending on June 21: attack traffic was sent from over 316,000 IP addresses towards a single Cloudflare IP address that was mostly used for websites on our Free plan. No downtime or service degradation was reported during the attack, and no charges accrued to customers due to our unmetered mitigation guarantee.
The attack was detected and handled automatically by Gatebot, our global DDoS detection and mitigation system without any manual intervention by our teams. Notably, because our automated systems were able to mitigate the attack without issue, no alerts or pages were sent to our on-call teams and no humans were involved at all.

During those four days, the attack utilized a combination of three attack vectors over the TCP protocol: SYN floods, ACK floods and SYN-ACK floods. The attack campaign sustained for multiple hours at rates exceeding 400-600 million packets per second Continue reading




