What happened A massive DDoS campaign recently hit a large-scale user-generated content platform with over 2.45 billion malicious requests in just five hours. But this wasn't your typical brute-force flood. The attackers distributed traffic across 1.2 million unique IP addresses spanning 16,402 autonomous systems, keeping each individual IP's request rate so low that it looked completely legitimate in isolation. Each source averaged just one request every nine seconds. No single IP looked malicious. No single network stood out. The top contributing ASN accounted for only three percent of total attack traffic. Traditional rate limiting didn't stand a chance. How the attack worked The campaign peaked at 205,344 requests per second while maintaining a sustained average of around 136,000 RPS. But the sophistication wasn't in the volume. It was in the structure. The attackers used deliberate wave patterns instead of a constant flood.…