Cloudflare handled a DDoS attack from the Mantis botnet which broke records with its powerful attack in June.
The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack mitigated last month by Cloudflare came from a new botnet called Mantis, which is currently being described as “the most powerful botnet to date.”
The attack peaked at 26 million requests per second coming from 5,067 devices. The previous record was held by the Mēris, which launched an attack with 21.8 million requests per second.
DDoS mitigation company Cloudflareis monitoring Mantis botnet attacks against thousands of its customers.
Cloudflare explains in a report today that its analysts named the botnet Mantis after the Mantis shrimp, which can deliver devastating blows with its claws and is about 10 cm (4 inches) long. Similarly, the botnet is extremely powerful despite relying on a small number of devices.
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Typical botnets must compromise a large number of connected devices to amass sufficient firepower to execute disruption attacks against protected targets.
The Mantis botnet's targets focus on servers and virtual machines, which have much more resources.
Making many HTTPS is a resource-intensive process, so the more powerful the devices that make up the botnet swarm, the more powerful the DDoS attacks they can launch.
The previous record holder, Mēris, achieved particularly powerful attacks by recruiting MikroTik, which feature powerful hardware.
The Mantis botnet targets entities in the IT and telecommunications (36%), news, media and publishing (15%), finance (10%), and video games (12%). In the past 30 days, Mantis has launched 3,000 DDoS attacks against nearly a thousand Cloudflare customers, the company notes.
See also: New Go botnet Panchan spreads rapidly across educational networks
Most of the targets are organizations in the United States (20%) and the Russian Federation (15%), while victims in Turkey, France, Poland ,Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada account for between 2.5% and 5%.
To help administrators prepare for DDoS attacks, Cloudflare has issued a series of best practices and guidance on how to respond to attacks.
Source: bleepingcomputer.com
