Minecraft server hit with record-breaking DDoS attack
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A Minecraft server has been affected by a distributed denial of service (DDoS (opens in new tab)) attack that Cloudflare claims is the largest attack, bitrate-wise, ever mitigated.
As reported by BleepingComputerthe attack was carried out by a variant of Mirai (one of the world’s most infamous botnets), against a Minecraft server called Wynncraft.
Whoever was behind the attack managed to develop a 2.5 Tbps strike, which lasted about two minutes. It consisted of UDP and TCP flood packets that tried to overwhelm the servers and keep “hundreds of thousands” of players out. According to Cloudflare, which defended itself against the incident, people who played the game “didn’t even notice the attack”.
Major DDoS attacks grow in number
These numbers are part of Cloudflare’s DDoS Threat Report for Q3 2021. In the report, the company claims that multi-terabit DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent. During the third quarter, it even softened “multiple” attacks above 1 Tbps.
Overall, the number of DDoS attacks has increased over the past 12 months. Volumetric attacks also continue to increase, especially against targets in Taiwan and Japan. In these two countries, the number of attacks grew by 200% and 105 percent respectively on a quarterly basis. In addition, the report claims that HTTP DDoS attacks grew 111% year-over-year, but declined 10% quarter-over-quarter.
Layer 3 and Layer 4 DDoS attacks grew 97% year-over-year and 24% quarter-on-quarter, Cloudflare added, stating that threat actors are particularly fond of Mirai.
“Attacks can be human-initiated, but they’re executed by bots — and to play to win, you have to fight bots with bots,” Cloudflare said, commenting on his findings. “Detection and mitigation should be automated as much as possible because relying solely on humans puts defenders at a disadvantage.”
“Over the years, it has become easier, cheaper and more accessible for attackers and attackers-for-hire to launch DDoS attacks.”