Cloudflare: short DDoS bursts rose 208% in Q3 2026
Original title: Cloudflare DDoS Threat Report 2026 Q3: More swarms, fewer giants
Attacks over 1 Tbps fell to 251 from 805 after takedowns of four large IoT botnets.
Cloudflare’s Q3 2026 DDoS report says its network mitigated 18.2 million network-layer attacks and 14.4 trillion HTTP DDoS requests, about 8,226 network-layer attacks an hour. Short attacks under 10 minutes and 1 Gbps rose 208% year over year, while hyper-volumetric attacks above 1 Tbps dropped nearly 69% from Q2, which Cloudflare links to early-2026 action against Aisuru, KimWolf, JackSkid, and Mossad. CLDAP floods collapsed by 99.5% quarter over quarter as DNS amplification rose 215% and UDP floods rose 122%. The United States was the most-attacked location, ahead of China.
Unconfirmed: The drop in attacks above 1 Tbps is only possibly tied to the botnet law-enforcement actions.
- Ninety-six percent of network-layer attacks ended in under 10 minutes; 98% stayed under 1 Gbps.
- Mirai-classified mitigation peaked in August at 57.23 PB, 46.5% of mitigated network-layer bytes.
- The longest sustained Mirai attack ran 49.7 hours from August 19 to August 21.
- Canada rose from 16th to 6th most attacked; Israel moved seven places to 10th.
Impact: Network and HTTP services overwhelmed by distributed denial-of-service traffic
- Vendors
- Cloudflare
- Organizations
- Cloudforce One
From the original article
5 min read at blog.cloudflare.com
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By Cloudforce One · blog.cloudflare.com
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