The biggest DDoS attack ever just tried delivering 9,350 HD movies worth of data to one IP in 45 seconds

As cyber criminals get better and better hardware, we're seeing attacks that eclipse anything we've ever seen before. Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are getting especially nasty, and because they deliver a measurable amount of data during the attack, cybersecurity experts have been monitoring them and seeing if they break any records. Well, one attack just took the record for the biggest DDoS attack ever, and when put into perspective, it's a stunning amount of data being transferred to one IP address.

A 37.4 terabyte attack on a single IP address takes the crown for the biggest DDoS siege

As spotted by Tom's Hardware, CloudFlare has reported that it managed to block a giant DDoS attack on a single IP address. If you're not sure what CloudFlare is, there's a good chance you've interacted with it without realising it. Most of the time, if you have to click a CAPTCHA to access a website, that CAPTCHA was served by CloudFlare.

One of CloudFlare's many services is stopping DDoS attack. This is when a malicious agent tries to flood a single IP address with a ton of data in a bid to overflow it and slow it to a crawl. The cyber criminal is usually trying to knock the target service online so nobody can access it. As a real-world example, imagine someone sending hundreds of people to storm a store and demand to talk to an employee, jamming up the system so that legitimate customers can't get their shopping done.

So, how big was this attack, exactly? Well, if you can't imagine downloading 37.4 terabytes of data in 45 seconds, that's exactly what the DDoS attack tried to force the target to do. As reported by CloudFlare:

37.4 terabytes is not a staggering figure in today’s scales, but blasting 37.4 terabytes in just 45 seconds is. It’s the equivalent to flooding your network with over 9,350 full-length HD movies, or streaming 7,480 hours of high-definition video nonstop (that’s nearly a year of back-to-back binge-watching) in just 45 seconds. If it were music, you’d be downloading about 9.35 million songs in under a minute, enough to keep a listener busy for 57 years straight. Think of snapping 12.5 million high-resolution photos on your smartphone and never running out of storage—even if you took one shot every day, you’d be clicking away for 4,000 years — but in 45 seconds.

Fortunately, CloudFlare's systems identified and blocked the DDoS attack, so no damage was done. However, it is a worrying sign that these attacks are only going to get bigger and bigger as time goes on, so cybersecurity firms will have to up their own game to keep up with bad actors online.