Akamai mitigated a new record-breaking DDoS attack against a Europen customer

Akamai announced to have recently blocked a new record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

On Monday, September 12, 2022, Akamai mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever that hit one of its European customers. The malicious traffic peaked at 704.8 Mpps and appears to originate from the same threat actor behind the previous record that Akamai blocked in July and that hit the same customer.

The following table compared the two massive DDoS attacks, it is possible to verify that while in July the number of cumulative attacks was 75, in September it jumped up to 201.

	July Attack	September Attack
Peak pps	659.6 Mpps	704.8 Mpps
Cumulative Attacks	75	201
IPs Targeted	512	1813
Vector	UDP	UDP
Distribution	1 location	6 locations
Date of Attack	July 21, 2022	September 12, 2022
Top Scrubbing Locations	HKG, LON, TYO	HKG, TYO, LON

Unlike the July attack, this time the attackers launched the attack against six data center locations from Europe to North America.

“On Monday, September 12, 2022, Akamai successfully detected and mitigated the now-largest DDoS attack ever launched against a European customer on the Prolexic platform, with attack traffic abruptly spiking to 704.8 Mpps in an aggressive attempt to cripple the organization’s business operations.” reads the analysis published by Akamai. “The attackers’ command and control system had no delay in activating the multidestination attack, which escalated in 60 seconds from 100 to 1,813 IPs active per minute. Those IPs were spread across eight distinct subnets in six distinct locations.”

Akamai applauded the approach adopted by its customer to mitigate DDoS attacks, after the July attack it had secured all of its 12 data centers.

“Having a proven DDoS mitigation strategy and platform in place is imperative for shielding your business from downtime and disruption” concludes the security firm.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, hacking)

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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”.