A Minecraft server has been hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that Cloudflare claims is the largest attack, bitrate-wise, ever mitigated.

As reported by BleepingComputer, the attack was conducted by a variant of Mirai (one of the world’s most notorious botnets), against a Minecraft server called Wynncraft.

Whoever was behind the attack managed to develop a 2.5 Tbps strike, which lasted approximately two minutes. It consisted of UDP and TCP floods packets that tried to overwhelm the servers and keep out “hundreds of thousands” of players. According Cloudflare, which defended against the incident, people playing the game “didn’t even notice the attack”.

Large DDoS attacks growing in numbers

These figures are part of Cloudflare’s DDoS Threat Report for Q3 2021. In the report, the company claims multi-terabit DDoS attacks are growing more frequent. In fact, during Q3, it mitigated “multiple” attacks exceeding 1 Tbps.

Overall, the number of DDoS attacks has grown over the course of the last twelve months. Longer-lasting volumetric attacks are also on the rise, especially against targets in Taiwan and Japan. In these two countries, attacks grew 200% and 105 percent quarter-on-quarter, respectively. Furthermore, the report claims HTTP DDoS attacks grew by 111% year-on-year, but dropped 10% quarter-on-quarter. 

Layer 3 and Layer 4 DDoS attacks grew by 97% year-on-year, and 24% quarter-on-quarter, Cloudflare added, stating that threat actors are particularly fond of Mirai. 

“Attacks may be initiated by humans, but they are executed by bots — and to play to win, you must fight bots with bots,” said Cloudflare, commenting on its findings. “Detection and mitigation must 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.”

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