Cloudflare mitigated 18.2 million DDoS attacks in Q3 2026
Original title: Hackers Launch Over 18 Million DDoS Attacks in Three Months, Cloudflare Reports
Attacks rose 208% year over year, but 98% stayed under 1 Gbps and most ended within ten minutes.
Cloudflare’s Q3 2026 DDoS report, covering July through September and published October 29, says it mitigated 18.2 million network-layer attacks, about 8,226 per hour, plus 14.4 trillion malicious HTTP requests. Mitigated traffic was 272.6 petabytes at the network layer and 95.1 petabytes at HTTP. Cloudflare links the short, frequent pattern to DDoS-for-hire booter services and says autonomous mitigation matters because most attacks end within minutes.
Unconfirmed: Cloudflare did not establish that earlier 2026 law-enforcement disruptions caused the drop in attacks above 1 Tbps.
- Ninety-six percent of network-layer attacks ended within ten minutes.
- Attacks above 1 Tbps fell from 805 in Q2 to 251 in Q3.
- DNS amplification rose 215% to 3.43% of attacks; CLDAP fell 99.5%.
- The United States was the most-attacked location, ahead of China and Indonesia.
- Media, Production & Publishing remained the top industry as targeting diversified.
Impact: Short floods that can overwhelm unprotected servers and sites
- 1.Use autonomous detection and mitigation rather than waiting for manual response.
- Vendors
- Cloudflare
- Organizations
- Cloudforce One
From the original article
2 min read at gbhackers.com
In the third quarter of 2026, Cloudflare successfully mitigated 18. 2 million network-layer distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. This increase indicates a trend among attackers who now favor short, frequent disruptions over large traffic floods.
By Divya · gbhackers.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.