Internet services provider Cloudflare has announced that it has successfully protected one of its clients from one of the most powerful DDoS (Distributed-Denial-of-Service) attacks in history. According to the services provider, an undisclosed cryptocurrency platform was targeted by a botnet comprising around 6,000 "zombie" computers distributed throughout 112 different countries. The botnet ultimately generated a collective 15.3 million requests per second. While that's still shy of the largest recorded metric - set at 17.2 million requests per second - the fact that the DDoS attack occurred through HTTPS likely pushed its complexity above the record-setting attack, due to the higher computational workload of secure HTTP. The attack lasted 15 seconds.

DDoS attacks aim to flood a network with requests and data packets in a bid to overload and paralyze it. The attack also showcases the ingenuity of bad actors, as the originated from cloud-based ISPs, as attackers leverage more complex and capable networking hardware than what's usually offered by last-mile ISPs. According to Cloudflare, the botnet seems to have mostly compromised systems with Java-based applications that were still open to the recently-discovered CVE-2022-21449 vulnerability.

BadgerDAO, "one of the most security-minded DAOs in operation", has been hit with a cryptocurrency heist enabled via a JavaScript hack on their website. BadgerDAO enables Bitcoin holders to "bridge" their cryptocurrency over to the smart-contract and DeFi-enabled Ethereum platform via its token, thus allowing access to the world of decentralized finance. After preliminary investigations aided by blockchain security and data analytics Peckshield, it seems that the bad actors inserted a malicious script in the BadgerDAO website - in turn intercepting Web 3.0 transactions and inserting a request to transfer the victim's tokens to the attacker's chosen address. It's currently estimated that around $120 million were siphoned off via this attack. A single transfer saw 896 Bitcoin being diverted this way - a cool $50 million.

As soon as BadgerDAO became aware of suspect wallet activity, the company immediately froze all smart contracts running in its platform - a way to stem the bleeding until the security audit could be conducted. Thursday night, BadgerDAO announced it had "retained data forensics experts Chainalysis to explore the full scale of the incident & authorities in both the US & Canada have been informed & Badger is cooperating fully with external investigations as well as proceeding with its own."

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today reported record revenue for the first quarter ended May 2, 2021, of $5.66 billion, up 84 percent from a year earlier and up 13 percent from the previous quarter, with record revenue from the company's Gaming, Data Center and Professional Visualization platforms. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were a record $3.03, up 106 percent from a year ago and up 31 percent from the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $3.66, up 103 percent from a year earlier and up 18 percent from the previous quarter.

"We had a fantastic quarter, with strong demand for our products driving record revenue," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Our Data Center business continues to expand, as the world's industries take up NVIDIA AI to process computer vision, conversational AI, natural language understanding and recommender systems. NVIDIA RTX has reinvented computer graphics and is driving upgrades across the gaming and design markets. Our partners are launching the largest-ever wave of NVIDIA-powered laptops. Across industries, the adoption of NVIDIA computing platforms is accelerating.

Cloudflare, Inc., the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced it is partnering with NVIDIA to bring AI to the edge at scale.

Today's applications use AI for a variety of tasks from translating text on webpages to object recognition in images, making machine learning models a critical part of application development. Users expect this functionality to be fast and reliable, while developers want to keep proprietary machine learning models reliable and secure. Cloudflare is seamlessly solving for their security, performance, and reliability needs while NVIDIA provides developers with a broad range of AI-powered application frameworks including Jarvis for natural language processing, Clara for healthcare and life sciences, and Morpheus for cybersecurity.

The combination of NVIDIA accelerated computing technology and Cloudflare's edge network will create a massive platform on which developers can deploy applications that use pre-trained or custom machine learning models in seconds. By leveraging the TensorFlow platform developers can use familiar tools to build and test machine learning models, and then deploy them globally onto Cloudflare's edge network.

NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA BlueField -3 DPU, its next-generation data processing unit, to deliver the most powerful software-defined networking, storage and cybersecurity acceleration capabilities available for data centers.

The first DPU built for AI and accelerated computing, BlueField-3 lets every enterprise deliver applications at any scale with industry-leading performance and data center security. It is optimized for multi-tenant, cloud-native environments, offering software-defined, hardware-accelerated networking, storage, security and management services at data-center scale.

The ubiquitous DDoS-mitigation and CDN provider, Cloudflare, announced that its latest Gen X servers implement AMD EPYC processors ditching Intel Xeons with its older Gen 9 servers. Cloudflare uses multi-functional servers (just like Google), in which each server is capable of handling any kind of the company's workloads (DDoS mitigation, content delivery, DNS, web-security, etc.). The company minimizes server hardware configurations so they're easier to maintain and lower TCO. The hardware specs of its servers are periodically updated and classified by "generations."

Cloudflare's Gen X server is configured with a single-socket 2nd gen AMD EPYC 7642 processor (48-core/96-thread, 256 MB L3 cache), and 256 GB of octa-channel DDR4-2933 memory, along with NVMe flash-based primary storage. "We selected the AMD EPYC 7642 processor in a single-socket configuration for Gen X. This CPU has 48-cores (96 threads), a base clock speed of 2.4 GHz, and an L3 cache of 256 MB. While the rated power (225 W) may seem high, it is lower than the combined TDP in our Gen 9 servers and we preferred the performance of this CPU over lower power variants. Despite AMD offering a higher core count option with 64-cores, the performance gains for our software stack and usage weren't compelling enough," Cloudflare writes in its blog post announcing Gen X. The new servers will go online in the coming weeks.Many Thanks to biffzinker for the tip.