Cloudflare Inc. today released its quarterly distributed denial-of-service report, which is led by yet another record-high DDoS attack.

The record-breaking attack in question hit an unprecedented 201 million requests per second. The figure is notably higher than the previous largest recorded attack, which stood at 71 million rps and was detailed by Cloudflare in February.

Along with that new attack, Cloudflare’s report delves into the broader dynamics of the evolving cyberthreat landscape. The company’s insights are derived from its capability to process an average of 64 million HTTP requests per second daily, giving it the ability to observe and mitigate about 140 billion cyberthreats daily.

Among industries targeted, gaming and gambling companies were a favorite target of attackers in the third quarter. The report suggests that the underlying motivations for the focus range from the financial incentives associated with these industries to the technical challenges gambling and gaming have in protecting against attackers.

The quarter also saw a steady growth in attack traffic. HTTP DDoS attack traffic saw a 65% increase compared to the previous quarter. Layer 3/4 DDoS attacks, which target the network and transport layers of the OSI model, saw a 14% increase in the quarter. Layer 3/4 DDoS attacks are designed to deplete infrastructure resources like bandwidth and processing capacity of network equipment rather than directly assailing applications.

By region, Asia’s cryptocurrency sector faced the most attacks for the second consecutive quarter. Europe maintained a consistent trend, with the gaming and gambling industry the top target for the fourth straight quarter. Surprisingly, farming dominated the attack landscape in Latin America, accounting for more than half of the region’s attacks.

The Middle East saw retail companies as the primary target, while in North America, the marketing and advertising sector was overtaken by a DDoS attacks targeted at the software industry. Oceania saw the telecommunications industry topping the list, with more than 45% of all regional attacks targeting it.

While the volume of DDoS attacks continued to increase, the good news is that Cloudflare has stepped up to the plate to challenge them head-on. Cloudflare systems automatically detected and mitigated the vast majority of attacks, with its systems deploying emergency countermeasures.

Cloudflare noted that its customers who use HTTP reverse proxy, encompassing Cloudflare’s content delivery network and web application firewall services, are shielded from intense DDoS attacks. For non-Cloudflare customers, the report notes the importance of using an automated, always-on HTTP DDoS Protection service for HTTP applications to protect against DDoS attacks.

Image: Cloudflare