If you thought the AI industry deals with big numbers—millions of tokens, giga-zigga-exa-flexa-FLOPs (a very real metric, I tell you)—wait until you hear about the internet. That thing has been taking an absolute beating over the last year. We've seen very visible effects of this with various memorable outages, but now we've also got some numbers to put to it, in the form of "hyper-volumetric" DDoS attacks.
Giant content delivery network (CDN) Cloudflare has released some somewhat troubling stats and info regarding the past year of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These are essentially attacks that attempt to flood a target service with packets of data to overload and overwhelm it and prevent it from doing the work it's actually meant to be doing, such as providing an internet connection to customers or displaying webpages.
