The devices were designed to what experts call a "SIM farm," an industrial-scale operation where hundreds or thousands of SIM cards can be manipulated simultaneously. These setups are typically associated with financial fraud or bulk messaging scams. Still, the Secret Service warned that they can also be used to flood telecom networks, disable cell towers, and obscure the origin of communications. In the shadow of the UN, where global leaders convene and security tensions are high, the proximity of such a system raised immediate questions about intent, attribution, and preparedness. "(SIM farms) could jam cell and text services, block emergency calls, target first responders with fake messages, spread disinformation, or steal login codes," Jake Braun, Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Initiative at the University of Chicago and former White House Acting Principal Deputy National Cyber Director, tells The Cipher Brief. "In short, they could cripple communications just when they're needed most."
DDoS detection tool FastNetMon detected a DDoS attack of 1.5 billion packets per second. The target: a European provider of DDoS scrubbing services. The attack is one of the largest DDoS attacks ever, but still falls far short of the 11.5 billion packets recently detected by Cloudflare. The choice of target is striking in any case: the DDoS attack was aimed at a service that protects other organizations against the consequences of such a "packet flood."
"Over the past few weeks, we've autonomously blocked hundreds of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, with the largest reaching peaks of 5.1 Bpps and 11.5 Tbps," the web infrastructure and security company said in a post on X. "The 11.5 Tbps attack was a UDP flood that mainly came from Google Cloud." The entire attack lasted only about 35 seconds, with the company stating its "defenses have been working overtime."
Over the Labor Day weekend, Cloudflare says it successfully stopped a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps). This came only a few months after Cloudflare blocked a then all-time high DDoS attack of 7.3 Tbps. This latest attack was almost 60% larger. According to Cloudflare, the assault was the result of a hyper-volumetric User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood attack that lasted about 35 seconds. During that just more than half-minute attack, it delivered over 5.1 billion packets per second.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a profoundly unsexy cybercrime, and that's a big problem. Headlines are full of ransomware, data breaches, or the latest exploit. DDoS, where a site or service is poleaxed by a packet tsunami, is just background noise. Now and again, security agencies put out a press release because they've taken down one of the botnets that propagate DDoS attacks, but that's been going on for decades without much effect.
Although not well-suited for new users, Arch Linux is a popular distro with a passionate fan base. So, why has someone been knocking down the site repeatedly for over a week now with an ongoing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ? We don't know. We're not even sure who's doing it or exactly how they're conducting their DDoS. Besides the main website, the Arch User Repository (AUR) and the are also being hammered. Someone out there really doesn't like Arch.
NoName057(16) has been operational since March 2022, acting as a pro-Kremlin collective that mobilizes ideologically motivated sympathizers on Telegram to launch DDoS attacks.
The now defunct platforms - Cfxapi, Cfxsecurity, neostress, jetstress, quickdown and zapcut - are thought to have facilitated widespread attacks on schools, government services, businesses, and gaming platforms between 2022 and 2025.
