- In Q1 2025 there were 20.5 million DDoS attacks
- In the whole 2024 there were 21.3 million
- Hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks are growing more popular
In the first quarter of 2025, there were as many Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks as there were through the entire 2024.
This is according to Cloudflare’s new Q1 2025 DDoS Threat Report, published earlier this week. Based on data from the Cloudflare network, the report claims that in the first three months of 2025, there were 20.5 million DDoS attacks, almost the same as in all 12 months of 2024 which had 21.3 million such incidents.
This also represents a stunning 358% year-on-year increase, as well as a 198% quarter-on-quarter increase.
Targeting Germany
A Distributed Denial of Service attack works by flooding the target server with information packages from a vast, distributed network. If the server cannot process all of the requests on time, it bogs down, denying regular visitors proper access. There are different types of DDoS attacks, with hyper-volumetric ones now being “the new normal.”
A hyper-volumetric DDoS attack is a massive cyberattack that floods a network or website with an extremely large volume of fake traffic, often measured in terabits per second. These require a huge network of devices, which is why in the past they weren’t as common. However, in Q1, roughly 700 attacks were deemed hyper-volumetric as they exceeded rates of 1 billion packets per second (pps) or 1Tbps – averaging about 8 attacks a day.
At the same time, network-layer DDoS attacks (which target the lower levels of the internet stack, like routers and firewalls, by flooding them with traffic such as ICMP or UDP packets) are getting more popular. There were 16.8 million such attacks, representing a staggering 509% YoY increase and a 397% quarter-over-quarter increase.
Germany is the number-one most targeted country in the world, followed by Turkey, who jumped 11 spots to reach second place. China slipped to third. As for the location of the attackers, Hong Kong is the number one source, followed by Indonesia and Argentina.
