Mantis botnet responsible for the record-breaking DDoS attack in June
Image courtesy:The Cloudfare Blog
The record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that Cloudflare mitigated last month originated from a new botnet called Mantis, which is currently described as “the most powerful botnet to date.”
The attack peaked at 26 million requests per second that had come from 5,067 devices. The last record was held by the Mēris botnet, which launched an attack that spiked at 21.8 million requests per second.
DDoS mitigation company Cloudfare has been tracing Mantis botnet attacks against one thousand of its’ customers.
“Cloudflare explains in a report today that its analysts named the botnet Mantis after the Mantis Shrimp that can deliver devastating blows with its claws while being roughly 10 cm (4 inches) long. Similarly, the botnet is extremely powerful despite relying on a small number of devices,” a source as per Bleeping Computer.
Typical botnets need to compromise a large number of connected devices to have sufficient firepower to deliver disrupting attacks against protected targets.
Mantis targets focus on servers and virtual machines, which come with significantly more resources. They generate many HTTPS requests which are a resource-demanding process. So the more stronger the devices that consist of the botnet swarm, the more potent the DDoS attack they can execute.
Mēris achieved particularly powerful attacks by recruiting MikroTik devices, that feature powerful hardware.
According to Bleeping Computer, Mantis targets entities in the IT and telecom (36%), news, media, and publications (15%), finance (10%), and gaming (12%) sectors. Over the past 30 days, Mantis launched 3,000 DDoS attacks against almost a thousand Cloudflare customers, the company notes.
