Cloudflare on Tuesday said it mitigated 7.3 million distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the second quarter of 2025, a significant drop from 20.5 million DDoS attacks it fended off the previous quarter.
“Overall, in Q2 2025, hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks skyrocketed,” Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco said. “Cloudflare blocked over 6,500 hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, an average of 71 per day.”
In Q1 2025, the company said an 18-day sustained campaign against its own and other critical infrastructure protected by Cloudflare was responsible for 13.5 million of the attacks observed during the time period. Cumulatively, Cloudflare has blocked nearly 28 million DDoS attacks, surpassing the number of attacks it mitigated in all of 2024.
The notable of the attacks in Q2 2025 is a staggering DDoS attack that peaked at 7.3 terabits per second (Tbps) and 4.8 billion packets per second (Bpps) within a span of 45 seconds.
Big traffic spikes like these make headlines—but what often gets missed is how attackers are now combining them with smaller, targeted probes. Instead of just overwhelming systems with brute force, they’re mixing large-scale floods with quiet scans to find weak spots and slip past defenses built to block only the obvious.
Layer 3/Layer 4 (L3/4) DDoS attacks declined 81% quarter-over-quarter to 3.2 million, while HTTP DDoS attacks rose 9% to 4.1 million. More than 70% of the HTTP DDoS attacks emanated from known botnets. The most common L3/4 attack vectors were flood attacks conducted over DNS, TCP SYN, and UDP protocols.
Telecommunication service providers and carriers were among the most targeted, followed by the Internet, IT services, gaming, and gambling sectors.
China, Brazil, Germany, India, South Korea, Turkey, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Russia, and Azerbaijan emerged as the most attacked locations based on the billing country of the Cloudflare customers. Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Argentina, and Ukraine were the top five sources of DDoS attacks.
The web infrastructure and security company also revealed that the number of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks exceeding 100 million packets per second (pps) increased by 592% compared to the previous quarter.
Another significant aspect is the 68% increase in ransom DDoS attack, which occurs when malicious actors attempt to extort money from an organization by threatening them with a DDoS attack. It also involves scenarios where the attacks are carried out and a ransom is demanded to stop it from happening again.
“While the majority of DDoS attacks are small, hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks are increasing in size and frequency,” Cloudflare said. “Six out of every 100 HTTP DDoS attacks exceed 1M rps, and 5 out of every 10,000 L3/4 DDoS attacks exceed 1 Tbps — a 1,150% QoQ increase.”
The company further has called attention to a botnet variant dubbed DemonBot that infects Linux-based systems, predominantly unsecured IoT devices, via open ports or weak credentials to enlist them into a DDoS botnet that can carry out UDP, TCP, and application-layer floods.
“Attacks are typically command-and-control (C2) driven and can generate significant volumetric traffic, often targeting gaming, hosting, or enterprise services,” it added. “To avoid infection, leverage antivirus software and domain filtering.”
Infection vectors like those exploited by DemonBot highlight broader challenges with unsecured IoT exposure, weak SSH credentials, and outdated firmware—common themes across DDoS botnet proliferation. Related attack strategies, such as TCP reflection, DNS amplification, and burst-layer evasion, are increasingly discussed in Cloudflare’s application-layer threat reports and API security breakdowns.
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