DDoS attacks have only gotten more sophisticated as time goes on. An increasingly popular tactic among bad actors is to hit hard and fast in what are described as 'hypervolumetric' attacks.
For instance, last October one ISP based in East Asia was pummeled by a botnet at a rate of 5.6 terabit per second. According to Cloudflare's quarterly DDoS threat report, the incident on October 29 was the largest attack of its kind ever reported (via Bleeping Computer).
The volley was launched from a Mirai-based botnet of 13,000 compromised devices, lobbing requests from about 5,500 unique IP addresses per second.
Breaking it down further, Cloudflare shared, «The average contribution of each IP address per second was around 1 Gbps (~0.012% of 5.6 Tbps).» Despite the eye-watering rate of this barrage, the entire attack only lasted 80 seconds.
Naturally Cloudflare took the opportunity to toot its own horn, sharing that the attack was autonomously mitigated by its distributed defense systems.