Hacking

Akamai blocked the largest DDoS attack ever on its European customers

This month Akamai blocked the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that hit an organization in Europe.

On July 21, 2022, Akamai mitigated the largest DDoS attack that ever hit one of its European customers.

The attack hit an Akamai customer in Eastern Europe that was targeted 75 times in the past 30 days with multiple types of DDoS attacks, including UDP, UDP fragmentation, ICMP flood, RESET flood, SYN flood, TCP anomaly, TCP fragment, PSH ACK flood, FIN push flood, and PUSH flood.

“On Thursday, July 21, 2022, Akamai detected and mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever launched against a European customer on the Prolexic platform, with globally distributed attack traffic peaking at 853.7 Gbps and 659.6 Mpps over 14 hours.” reads the post published by Akamai. “The attack, which targeted a swath of customer IP addresses, formed the largest global horizontal attack ever mitigated on the Prolexic platform.”

The malicious traffic peaked at 853.7 Gbps and 659.6 Mpps over 14 hours, this is the largest global horizontal attack ever mitigated on the Akami Prolexic platform.

DDoS attack 2DDoS attack 2
Source Akamai: Spike in BPS attack traffic

According to Akamai, threat actors used a highly-sophisticated, global botnet of compromised devices to launch the attack.

In September, the Russian Internet giant Yandex was hit by the largest DDoS attack in the history of Runet, the Russian Internet designed to be independent of the world wide web and ensure the resilience of the country to an internet shutdown. The attack was launched by the Mēris botnet and reached 21.8 million RPS (requests per second).

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, DDoS)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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