THE 2025 CLOUDFLARE RADAR YEAR IN REVIEW: THE RISE OF AI, POST-QUANTUM, AND RECORD-BREAKING DDOS ATTACKS

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Cloudflare recorded unprecedented DDoS attacks in 2025, with hyper-volumetric assaults reaching 31.4 Tbps and 14 Bpps. During this period, global Internet traffic increased by 19%, and AI crawler activity surged, with Googlebot accounting for 4.5% of HTML requests and user action crawling rising over 15 times. Adoption of post-quantum encryption nearly doubled, covering 52% of human-generated web traffic. An email security analysis revealed 5.6% of messages as malicious, mainly due to deceptive links. 174 major Internet outages were documented, with nearly half caused by government-enforced shutdowns. Security professionals should closely watch the expanding capacity for hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, adopt post-quantum cryptography as it becomes widely used, and enhance email security measures against sophisticated impersonation and brand deception attacks enabled by AI-generated content.