Cloudflare Reports 18.2 Million Network-Layer DDoS Attacks in Q3, Up 38% - The Hacker News
Web infrastructure company Cloudflare autonomously mitigated 18.2 million network-layer DDoS attacks in the third quarter of 2026, a 38% increase from the previous quarter.
Threat actors are launching an average of 8,226 network-layer DDoS attacks per hour, Cloudflare revealed.
This represents 197,400 attacks per day, or one every 0.44 seconds.
The increase is linked to DDoS-for-hire booter or stresser services. These services are responsible for hundreds of thousands of attacks and are a key driver of the threat landscape.
A significant trend is the rise of short-burst, low-bandwidth attacks. These attacks lasting under 10 minutes and 1 Gbps surged by 208%.
Short-burst, low-bandwidth attacks lasting under 10 minutes and 1 Gbps surged by 208%.
Conversely, hyper-volumetric attacks exceeding 1 Tbps declined by 69% from the previous quarter. This drop is likely due to law enforcement actions against groups like AISURU, KimWolf, JackSkid, and Mossad earlier this year.
Cloudflare warns that the threat remains far from neutralized. New variants like Dysphoria and Evooo1Bot have emerged, posing a new challenge to network security.
The U.S., China, Indonesia, the U.K., and Türkiye were the most attacked countries. Canada and Israel entered the top 10, with attacks targeting Canada's retail, telecommunications, and marketing sectors.
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