Cloudflare says 1 Tbps DDoS attacks grew sixfold in the second quarter
Cloudflare Inc. reported today that distributed denial-of-service attacks above 1 terabit per second grew sixfold between the first and second quarters of 2026, to 805 from 130. That took the half-year total to 935 attacks over 1 Tbps, against 219 in the fourth quarter of last year. Cloudflare said in the report that attackers now […] The post Cloudflare says 1 Tbps DDoS attacks grew sixfold in…
Cloudflare reported a sixfold increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks measuring over 1 terabit per second between the first and second quarters of 2026. From 130 attacks in the first quarter, there were 805 attacks in the second, contributing to a half-year total of 935 such attacks. Attackers now launch these massive attacks at a frequency of hundreds per quarter.
The analysis, compiled in the company's 25th DDoS Threat Report, covers traffic on Cloudflare's network. In total, 23.2 million network-layer attacks were mitigated over the six months, with 29.64 trillion HTTP DDoS requests recorded. About 1.23 exabits, or more than half of the absorbed attack traffic, was due to these assaults.
Most attacks remained brief, with 97% of network-layer attacks ceasing within 10 minutes and 90% ending after three hours. However, the duration of attacks increased significantly, with 108,976 attacks lasting over three hours in the second quarter, up from 38,865 in the first quarter. DNS-based attacks accounted for 34% of network-layer activity during the six-month period, a sharp rise from 26% in the first quarter.
The CLDAP Flood amplification attack against Active Directory domain controllers on UDP port 389 saw an 882% quarter-over-quarter increase, becoming the third most common vector. Geopolitical factors played a role, with the U.S. and Israel's Operation Epic Fury against Iranian targets causing 48% of worldwide government-targeted DDoS claims in the first month following the strikes.
Cloudflare noted that government bodies moved up 20 spots in the rankings of targeted sectors, climbing from 29th to ninth. Media, production, and publishing sectors led in DDoS mitigation requests, increasing their share from 7% to 21% of mitigated HTTP DDoS requests. China became the most-attacked country, accounting for 22% of global HTTP DDoS requests, surpassing the U.S. and Turkey.
Brazil overtook the U.S. as the largest source of attack traffic, reaching 15% of mitigated DDoS request traffic.
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