Mantis – Behind The Most Powerful Botnet Attack Ever Recorded With 26 Million RPS

Several attacks targeting almost 1,000 Cloudflare customers were traced back to the botnet that was responsible for the largest HTTPS DDoS attack in June 2022.

In its analysis of over 3,000 HTTP DDoS attacks against its users, the web performance and security company, Cloudflare named the powerful botnet Mantis. 

It was estimated that more than 26 million requests were made per second by 5,067 devices during the course of the attack. It used to be that the Meris botnet held the record for the most number of requests allowed per second, which peaked at 21.8 million requests per second during an attack.

Furthermore, this botnet is regarded as one of the most powerful botnets in history. It has been noted by Cloudflare that a larger number of its customers have been targeted by the Mantis botnet attacks.

Mantis – Most Powerful Botnet

Mantis is an extremely powerful botnet, and as a powerful botnet, Mantis is primarily targeted at large chunks of devices, which represent the majority of its attack surface.

Servers and virtual machines are the main targets of Mantis, as they have significantly more resources compared to desktop computers. This process requires a large amount of resources, as it generates many HTTPS requests simultaneously.

As a result, when the botnet swarm has a large number of powerful devices, then the DDoS attacks they can launch are going to be even more potent.

MikroTik devices were used by the Meris botnet in order to spread its malware. However, Mantis has gained a reputation for supporting a wide range of virtual machine platforms for attacking and allows the use of various HTTP proxy servers.

Victims

There are a number of sectors that Mantis targets, including:-

• IT and telecom stands at 36%
• News, media, and publications stands at 15%
• Gaming stands at 12%
• Finance stands at 10%

Organizations from the following countries are the most likely to be targeted by this botnet:-

• The United States
• Russia
• Turkey
• France
• Poland
• Ukraine
• The United Kingdom
• Germany
• Netherlands
• Canada

Cloudflare customers have been subjected to 3,000 DDoS attacks by Mantis over the past 30 days. There are several reasons why Mantis stands out from its competition, in addition to the fact that it offers exceptional capabilities.

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