Mantis - the most powerful botnet to date

In June 2022, a massive HTTPS DDoS attack was mitigated by Cloudflare's systems, with the largest attack on record reaching 26 million requests per second. The attack was launched by a botnet called "Mantis," which consists of approximately 5,000 bots. Unlike traditional IoT-based botnets, Mantis uses hijacked virtual machines and powerful servers, making each bot more resourceful. Since its inception, Mantis has targeted almost 1,000 Cloudflare customers across various industries such as Internet & Telecommunications, News, Media & Publishing, Gaming, and Finance. The majority of the attacks have been directed towards US-based companies, followed by Russia-based ones. To protect against Mantis and other DDoS attacks, Cloudflare's automated DDoS protection system leverages dynamic fingerprinting to detect and mitigate such threats.