Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71M request-per-second DDoS attack

blog.cloudflare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 151 posts

Re: Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71M request-per-second DDoS attack

#11

Post by _8j50 »

silisili wrote: post #4

This just feels like a typical sales team fluff piece. I worked in this space, and constantly read articles of different providers claiming to have blocked the biggest attack ever. Some go by total bandwidth, some by pps, some by number of actors, and apparently some by rps. Not that it isn't impressive, still, but hardly seems newsworthy.

I worked in space as well and it is very impressive. But also, this is a blog post, not news.

I would also want to know if Akamai sees similar attacks.

Re: Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71M request-per-second DDoS attack

#12

Post by tmikaeld »

blibble wrote: post #6
silisili wrote: post #4

This just feels like a typical sales team fluff piece. I worked in this space, and constantly read articles of different providers claiming to have blocked the biggest attack ever. Some go by total bandwidth, some by pps, some by number of actors, and apparently some by rps. Not that it isn't impressive, still, but hardly seems newsworthy.

indeed I suspect a single machine could put out 71M HTTP requests/second without too much difficulty (but cloudflare never misses an opportunity for a blog post)

Smallest packet flood size is like ~60 bytes, so ~16M req/s on a 1Gbit connection or ~166M req/s on 10 Gbit.

But I'm sure most providers or ISPs would block such output - thus, why it's a DDOS.

Re: Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71M request-per-second DDoS attack

#13

Post by gjulianm »

blibble wrote: post #6
silisili wrote: post #4

This just feels like a typical sales team fluff piece. I worked in this space, and constantly read articles of different providers claiming to have blocked the biggest attack ever. Some go by total bandwidth, some by pps, some by number of actors, and apparently some by rps. Not that it isn't impressive, still, but hardly seems newsworthy.

indeed I suspect a single machine could put out 71M HTTP requests/second without too much difficulty (but cloudflare never misses an opportunity for a blog post)

I wouldn't be so dismissive of 71M rps. At around 100 bytes per packet, that's ~70 Gbps minimum, only on requests. It's quite the volume of traffic, you'd need quite a bit of cores, good parsing code and good core and memory distribution. It isn't impossible but it isn't trivial either.

Edit: I misunderstood the comment and thought about "ingestion" and not "generation"

Re: Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71M request-per-second DDoS attack

#14

Post by _8j50 »

blibble wrote: post #6
silisili wrote: post #4

This just feels like a typical sales team fluff piece. I worked in this space, and constantly read articles of different providers claiming to have blocked the biggest attack ever. Some go by total bandwidth, some by pps, some by number of actors, and apparently some by rps. Not that it isn't impressive, still, but hardly seems newsworthy.

indeed I suspect a single machine could put out 71M HTTP requests/second without too much difficulty (but cloudflare never misses an opportunity for a blog post)

You can spit out all the traffic you want but who is going to route at that rate for you? If you somehow get it down to say 600 byte per request, that is 42GBps and 340Gbps.

That is 35 10G nics at wire rate.

Re: Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71M request-per-second DDoS attack

#15

Post by iJohnDoe »

realistik1 wrote: post #7

The startup I work for blocks all of china, russia, belarus and serbian IP space, which saves us about $50kper month in bandwidth charges. The absolutely first thing I do at every company and on every project is ask if I can block russia, china and belarussian IP space, and add all of their ASNs to the bogon list if we run our own bgp. They are never customers to the businesses of the companies I work for, but they s…

Doesn’t deserve the downvotes. All of it is truth.

So much garbage connections originate from the mentioned countries. Worst yet, these countries have poor connections in some cases and generate so many retires that also waste resources.

Re: Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71M request-per-second DDoS attack

#16

Post by neom »

silisili wrote: post #4

This just feels like a typical sales team fluff piece. I worked in this space, and constantly read articles of different providers claiming to have blocked the biggest attack ever. Some go by total bandwidth, some by pps, some by number of actors, and apparently some by rps. Not that it isn't impressive, still, but hardly seems newsworthy.

Usually I wouldn't post a Cloudflare mitigates blah blah blah blog, but I thought this one was particularly interesting because of the range of addresses, an attack that large spawning from over 30,000 IPs is a pretty well orchestrated attack. The most I've read pervious was well under half that (granted I've been out of networking for a long time).

Re: Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71M request-per-second DDoS attack

#17

Post by TimWolla »

blibble wrote: post #6
silisili wrote: post #4

This just feels like a typical sales team fluff piece. I worked in this space, and constantly read articles of different providers claiming to have blocked the biggest attack ever. Some go by total bandwidth, some by pps, some by number of actors, and apparently some by rps. Not that it isn't impressive, still, but hardly seems newsworthy.

indeed I suspect a single machine could put out 71M HTTP requests/second without too much difficulty (but cloudflare never misses an opportunity for a blog post)

71M requests per second gives you about 14ns per request. WolframAlpha says that's about 4 times the latency of a L2 cache access and 0.8 times the latency of a Mutex lock / unlock: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1+second+%2F+71+million. So even if you have a massive amount of cores in that machine, you still don't really have much time to spend on a single request and a single mutex operation will exceed your budget.

For comparison: HAProxy was able to deal with 2M requests per second on a single machine in 2021: https://www.haproxy.com/de/blog/haproxy-forwards-over-2-mill... (Disclosure: I'm a HAProxy community contributor).

Re: Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71M request-per-second DDoS attack

#18

Post by geraldwhen »

blibble wrote: post #6
silisili wrote: post #4

This just feels like a typical sales team fluff piece. I worked in this space, and constantly read articles of different providers claiming to have blocked the biggest attack ever. Some go by total bandwidth, some by pps, some by number of actors, and apparently some by rps. Not that it isn't impressive, still, but hardly seems newsworthy.

indeed I suspect a single machine could put out 71M HTTP requests/second without too much difficulty (but cloudflare never misses an opportunity for a blog post)

You won’t get more than tens of thousands of concurrent network connections at most per machine. Your network switch is likely to fail first, or your operating systems ability to manage concurrent requests. 71M is a lot more network than you suspect.

Re: Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71M request-per-second DDoS attack

#19

Post by archerx »

realistik1 wrote: post #7

The startup I work for blocks all of china, russia, belarus and serbian IP space, which saves us about $50kper month in bandwidth charges. The absolutely first thing I do at every company and on every project is ask if I can block russia, china and belarussian IP space, and add all of their ASNs to the bogon list if we run our own bgp. They are never customers to the businesses of the companies I work for, but they s…

I would add Turkey to that list. Many many years ago I had a kind of popular podcast about computer graphics and all of my grief was coming from Turkey. After I banned all of Turkey‘s IPs my drama was over. Occasionally I would get an email from someone saying they couldn’t listen to the episodes and I would explain to them why their country is blocked and they would say it’s not fair, I couldn’t disagree, its not fair but such is life.

Re: Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71M request-per-second DDoS attack

#20

Post by sammy2255 »

omgomgomgomg wrote: post #10

Cloudflare ddos mitigation is overrated. First they force you to upgrade your plan, if that does not help, anotyer upgrade, if that fails, chances are you will get a termination notice.

>First they force you to upgrade your plan

I don’t think that’s true, would you care to share more about that experience?

Post reply on HN