A botnet called Mantis has been linked to record-breaking assaults targeting nearly 1,000 Cloudflare customers.
In June 2022, DDoS mitigation firm Cloudflare disclosed that it successfully thwarted a record-breaking DDoS attack of 26 million requests per second. Just a couple of months earlier in April, Cloudflare also mitigated a previous record-breaking attack of 15.3 million requests per second. Mantis has now been linked to both attacks.
For the attacks, the majority of traffic originated from Indonesia, the US, Brazil, and Russia with the French OVH (Autonomous System Number 16276), the Indonesian Telkomnet (ASN 7713), the US-based iboss (ASN 137922), and the Libyan Ajeel (ASN 37284) being the top source networks. In the past month alone, over 3,000 HTTP DDoS attacks have been launched against Cloudflare customers.
While previous record-setting DDoS attacks have predominately been generated from botnets that have exploited the rapid proliferation of IoT devices, the latest assaults have increased their intensity by exploiting far more powerful devices.
Cloudflare’s Product Manager Omer Yoachimik stated that the attack last month “originated mostly from cloud service providers as opposed to residential internet service providers, indicating the use of hijacked virtual machines and powerful servers to generate the attack—as opposed to much weaker Internet of Things devices.”
In one attack on an unnamed customer last month, more than 212 million HTTPS requests were generated from over 1,500 networks across 121 countries in under 30 seconds.
The most impacted industry verticals include internet and telecom, media, gaming, finance, business, and shopping, of which over 20% of the attacks targeted U.S. firms, followed by Russia, Turkey, France, Poland, Ukraine, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada.
According to Cloudflare researchers, the botnet is identical to the shrimp and is less than 10cm in length. Despite being so small, the claws of mantis shrimps can generate a shock wave with a force of 1,500 Newtons at speeds of 83 km/h from a standing start.
“The Mantis botnet operates a small fleet of approximately 5,000 bots, but with them can generate a massive force — responsible for the largest HTTP DDoS attacks we have ever observed,” explained Yoachimik.
