A new botnet named Mantis, now regarded as “the most powerful botnet to date,” has been the source of the record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack handled by Cloudflare last month.
The attack’s highest rate was 26 million requests per second, coming from 5,067 different devices. The Mēris botnet previously held the record with an operation that peaked at 21.8 million requests per second. Cloudflare, a DDoS mitigation business, has been monitoring Mantis botnet attacks against thousands of its clients.
Cloudflare reveals in a recently-released report that its experts called the botnet Mantis after the Mantis Shrimp, which is around 10 cm (4 inches) long and has claws capable of dealing severe strikes. Similarly, the botnet is incredibly effective despite using very few devices. For most botnets to amass enough strength to launch disruptive cyberattacks on protected targets, a sizable number of linked devices must be compromised.
Servers and virtual machines, which have substantially greater resources, are the main focus of Mantis targets. Producing multiple HTTPS requests is a resource-intensive operation, so the more powerful the devices that make up the botnet swarm, the more devastating the DDoS attacks they can conduct. The former record holder, Mēris, produced exceptionally aggressive attacks using MikroTik devices, which had potent hardware.
Mantis primarily targets businesses in the information technology and telecommunications (36%), news, media, and publications (15%), gaming (12%), and finance (10%) sectors. According to the company, Mantis executed 3,000 DDoS attempts against almost a thousand Cloudflare clients over the previous 30 days.
Organizations in the US (20%) and the Russian Federation (15%) make up most of the targets. In contrast, victims in Turkey, Poland, Netherlands, Ukraine, France, the UK, Germany, and Canada make up between 2.5% and 5% of the total. Cloudflare has released a list of the best preventative measures as well as instructions on how to handle DDoS attacks in order to assist administrators in being ready for them.
