In its recently published report on DDoS threats for Q3 2022, Cloudflare Observed The most powerful attacks this quarter targeted Minecraft game servers. An individual or organization launched his 2.5 Tbps DDoS attack targeting his popular Wynncraft MMORPG Minecraft server via a variant of the Mirai botnet.
Cloudflare says multi-terabit attacks have become more frequent and its automated content protection and DDoS mitigation services responded to multiple attacks exceeding 1 Tbps in Q3.
Interestingly, Wynncraft’s targeted attack was “the biggest attack we’ve seen so far in terms of bitrate.” Minecraft is not political and has nothing to do with national security. However, it appears to be a popular target for DDoS attacks in tournaments where competitors vie for competitive advantage.
According to Cloudflare, the Wynncraft server attack originated from multiple vectors and consisted of UDP and TCP data packet floods. Luckily for Minecraft gamers preoccupied at the time of his powerful DDoS attack, Cloudflare’s system filtered out the attack, negating its intended effect.
The report also highlights some key DDoS trends from the last quarter. Some of the attacks were certainly political, including a spike in attacks against sites and institutions in Taiwan and Japan. (For context, China is pretty upset about U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in the third quarter, and North Korea likes to poke Japan.)
Fortunately, ransom attacks (attacks where attackers offer to reduce the size of their DDoS for a fee) seem to be on the decline, but September saw a spike. This may have something to do with the depreciation of cryptocurrencies that attackers typically demand payment from.
It’s also interesting to see a graph of the top countries from which DDoS attacks originate. Despite (or because of?) government power over the Internet, China is the clear leader. According to a Cloudflare post, “Attack traffic from IP addresses registered in China increased 29% year-over-year and 19% quarter-on-quarter.
