Cloudflare auto-mitigated world record 3.8 Tbps DDoS attack

49 points by beefman 9 months ago | 19 comments
  • walth 9 months ago
    Meanwhile, it’s going on two weeks that a large volumetric amplification attack has been coming from CF itself against systems I manage.

    Ironically, their abuse report does validate the domain being used to route traffic is a registered customer domain. But the abuse report and even Slack pings have yet to affect the traffic. It’s incredibly frustrating because you’d expect a company like Cloudflare, which positions itself as a defender against DDoS and similar threats, to take action much more quickly when they’re part of the problem.

    • theideaofcoffee 9 months ago
      Enh. I try to be positive in my comments as much as I can. Whenever the subject of DDoS mitigation by cloudflare comes up, and it seems like they're always tooting their own horn, I struggle to be impressed. By their own info, they have approximately 330 global locations [0]. 3800Gbps divided roughly (remember, anycast, and if their upstreams are well mixed, they're going to see pretty consistent splitting) equally across 330 locations is 'only' ~11.5 Gbps each location. I'm guessing within each PoP is more than a handful of machines dedicated to DDoS mitigation. So sure, they're doing computation on each bit of all of that, but it still doesn't seem all that significant. Toss half a cabinet at mitigation and continue on with your day. These capabilities are available at such commodity prices nowadays it's hardly worth the effort of a full page blog post.

      And ok, I'll give some leeway in those numbers looking at the map on the linked page, 35% or so of source traffic is clustered over five countries so that distribution skews and some pops around those source countries are going to be hit harder than others. Still, maybe add an order of magnitude and I'll be a little less dismissive.

      [0] https://www.cloudflare.com/network/

      • matsur 9 months ago
        The amount of work required to stand up 330 well connected locations and then operate infrastructure to filter traffic at that scale profitably is more than "tossing" cabinets at problems.

        This is on the level of BrandonM's famous comment on Dropbox. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

        • theideaofcoffee 9 months ago
          Nah, not really. I know the amount of work standing up even 5% of that requires because I've been there, done that, have the sheet metal scars to prove it. It's a lot of effort. It's just not -hard-. After a while it's a copy-paste problem with it bottle-necking around the human: signing documents, waiting for tickets and whatnot, and it's pretty disingenuous to suggest it's not.

          And ooh, ooh, I can flippantly dismiss a comment by calling back to that infamous comment as well! [0] You're actually posting this as a former VP? Geez dude, lighten up, they're not paying you anymore.

          [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40814123

          • orf 9 months ago
            Is your speculated 11.5gbit per location not a result of their system rather than something to look down on?

            Yes, anyone can shove a bunch of network equipment into a bunch of cabinets.

            No, not anyone can shove a bunch of network equipment into a bunch of cabinets and run a service like cloudflare on top of that.

            And is your argument really “I’ve spun up 16.5 PoP locations before, so I know what I’m talking about?”

        • dewey 9 months ago
          > and it seems like they're always tooting their own horn

          It’s called marketing.

        • psd1 9 months ago
          I worry that CF has perverse incentives
          • suprjami 9 months ago
            What "perverse incentives" do you think they have?

            They have a product. This is marketing for that product. The incentive is to make money. It's very clear imo.

            • psd1 9 months ago
              CF sells treatment, not cure, for ddos. They are a major player in internet technology.

              I presume that fora exist for players to discuss blue-team strategy, and that decisions are nuanced and detailed. If so, there's a lot of leeway to pursue a hidden agenda.

              I'm not so concerned about what their doing now. It's about in a few years, when stock isn't as strong and MBAs are parachuted in to perk up the bottom line.

              • suprjami 9 months ago
                How do you suggest CloudFlare "cure" DDoS? Wouldn't that mean finding the people who make the decision to do this and physically stop them? They're a CDN not the Mafia.
          • cedws 9 months ago
            65 second attack? Very suspicious. This attack must have had some very specific goal.
            • gomerspiles 9 months ago
              Why keep running an attack that didn't even work? Every second probably causes a loss of some bots up to a point..
              • blakesterz 9 months ago
                That is weirdly short. Maybe just a test? Someone proving they could do it as part of a threat? Someone accidently pressed the "Go" button accidently? Someone showing off?