This edition covers the third quarter of 2026 — July, August, and September — and returns the series to its quarterly cadence following the combined H1 2026 volume. The analysis is produced by Cloudforce One, Cloudflare's Threat Intelligence organization, providing a comprehensive analysis of the evolving threat landscape of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks based on data from the Cloudflare network.
Key insights - Short-burst, low-bandwidth attacks lasting under 10 minutes and 1 Gbps surged by 208%. Conversely, hyper-volumetric attacks exceeding 1 Tbps plummeted by nearly 69% from Q2, possibly a reflection of law enforcement actions against four major Internet of Things (IoT) botnets earlier in the year. Still, variants continue to emerge, proving that IoT botnets remain a durable, high-volume threat to network infrastructure. - Threat actors dramatically shifted their reflection and amplification tactics, abruptly abandoning CLDAP floods, which collapsed by 99.5% quarter-over-quarter.
