Most compromised devices were in Brazil.
A massive botnet with 1.33 million compromised devices was used to launch a distributed denial-of-service attack against a betting platform in late March.
According to Qrator Labs and published by The 420, the botnet is almost six times larger than last year's biggest botnet. The compromised devices came from Brazil, with devices from Argentina, Russia, Iraq, and Mexico cumulatively accounting for over 16 percent of the devices harnessed by the botnet.
The emergence of such a record-breaking botnet comes as DDoS attack volumes increased by 110 percent year-over-year during the first three months of 2025, with Qrator Labs chief technology officer Andrey Leskin warning that even robust systems could be taken down in attacks powered by increasingly enormous botnets.
Written by
Dan Raywood is a B2B journalist with 25 years of experience, including covering cybersecurity for the past 17 years. He has extensively covered topics from Advanced Persistent Threats and nation-state hackers to major data breaches and regulatory changes.
He has spoken at events including 44CON, Infosecurity Europe, RANT Forum, BSides Scotland, Steelcon and the National Cyber Security Show, and served as editor of SC Media UK, Infosecurity Magazine and IT Security Guru. He was also an analyst with 451 Research and a product marketing lead at Tenable.
