400Gbps: Winter of Whopping Weekend DDoS Attacks

Over the last month, CloudFlare has been dealing with some of the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks ever seen, peaking at around 400Gbps of aggregate inbound traffic. These layer 3 DDoS attacks consist of a large volume of packets hitting the target network and aim to overwhelm its hardware or connectivity. The recent spate of large attacks are all layer 3 (L3) DDoS, which are dangerous because most of the time the only solution is to acquire large network capacity and buy beefy networking hardware, which is not an option for many independent website operators. Fortunately, CloudFlare's automatic mitigation systems were able to sort good from bad packets and keep websites online during these attacks.