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ZDNET Highlights
- Aisuru broke the previous record with a 31.4 Tbps DDoS attack.
- It appears to be focused on telecommunications providers.
- Secure and small devices can be weaponized for large-scale cyber attacks.
The Aisuru botnet has reached new heights, breaking the previous distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) record with an attack at 200 Tbps with 200 million requests per second.
Also known as Kimwolf, Aisuru is one of the largest botnets currently in existence, operated by an estimated one to four million infected hosts worldwide, including home and consumer devices such as routers and online CCTV systems.
Its operators often scan the web for vulnerable devices with exposed ports or default credentials, and infect them to add them to the pool of devices that can be used to launch a tsunami of fake traffic against the target service.
Too: Why does the Internet keep breaking and shutting down your favorite sites in 2025?
Cloudflare dubbed Aisuru the “top of botnets” 2025 Q3 DDoS threat reportGiven that telecom firms, gaming companies, hosting providers, ISPs and financial services are typically among those targeted.
This is not a botnet that specifically belongs to one threat group. Instead, Aisuru is a botnet-for-hire, with its capabilities available for between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.
“Anyone could potentially spread chaos across an entire nation by crippling backbone networks and saturating Internet links, disrupting millions of users and disrupting access to essential services,” Cloudflare said.
As reported krebs on safetyThe botnet is also able to “rent” compromised devices to residential proxy providers, which can be used for data scraping and even large language model (LLM) training for AI projects. according to netscoutAisuru “incorporates additional dedicated DDoS attack capabilities and multi-use functions, enabling DDoS attacks and other illicit activities such as credential stuffing, AI-powered web scraping, spamming, and phishing.”
Previous DDoS records
The latest attack, recorded and mitigated by Cloudflare on December 19, reached a peak of 31.4 Tbps and 200 million requests per second. cloudflare called DDoS attack An “unprecedented bombardment” and “the largest attack ever publicly disclosed.”
Aisuru experienced thousands of attacks in 2025 and has now surpassed its previous record of 29.7 Tbps.
Why does Aisuru matter?
When a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is so powerful that it overwhelms a service with fraudulent traffic, it denies access to legitimate visitors, and so DDoS incidents only make headlines when a popular online service or resource is disrupted.
Above 47 million DDoS attacks were recorded in 2025, representing a 121% increase year-on-year.
It is to Cloudflare’s credit that this hyper-volumetric attack was also automatically detected and dealt with, and so we didn’t even know. However, the Aisuru attack is notable for highlighting the potential for rapid future growth of this botnet, as well as the increasing power and attack capabilities of DDoS botnets overall.
Additionally, much of Aisuru’s power comes from compromised consumer devices we frequently use at home, including routers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The recent weaponization of Android TV devices by Aisuru is a disturbing trend, who knows what other home products will be added to the botnet’s future pool.
Aisuru is another reminder to keep your electronics’ firmware and apps updated, and serves as a warning to manufacturers who are still shipping products carelessly or without protection.
internet disruption
Cloudflare also provided more than 180 important notifications internet disruption In 2025. In Q4 2025, only one major outage was government-directed – a nationwide shutdown during protests in Tanzania – while other power outages were caused by cable damage, extreme weather events, ongoing conflict and technical issues.
For example, in October a DNS failure in AWS’s US-East-1 region caused a massive outage, taking thousands of online services offline.
The record-breaking size of the Aisuru botnet may not mean much to people in numerical terms, but when you look at it alongside the recent wave of outages outlined by Cloudflare, it highlights the need for ongoing digital infrastructure security – especially when you consider how dependent our economies and societies are now on reliable connectivity.
