Pierluigi Paganini March 09, 2023

Akamai has mitigated the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack ever, which peaked at 900.1 gigabits per second.

Akamai reported that on February 23, 2023, at 10:22 UTC, it mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever. The attack traffic peaked at 900.1 gigabits per second and 158.2 million packets per second. The record-breaking DDoS was launched against a Prolexic customer in Asia-Pacific (APAC).

“On February 23, 2023, at 10:22 UTC, Akamai mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever launched against a Prolexic customer based in Asia-Pacific (APAC), with attack traffic peaking at 900.1 gigabits per second and 158.2 million packets per second.” reads the post published by Akamai.

The company pointed out that the attack was intense and short-lived, with most attack traffic bursting during the peak minute of the attack. The overall attack lasted only a few minutes.

Akamai mitigated the attack by redirecting the malicious traffic through its scrubbing network.

Most of the malicious traffic (48%) was managed by scrubbing centers in the APAC region, but the company claims that all its 26 centers were loaded, with only one center in HKG handling 14,6% of the total traffic.

Akamai states that there was no collateral damage thanks to its defense.

The previous record-breaking distributed denial of service attack mitigated by Akamai hit a company customer in Europe on September 2022. At the time, the malicious traffic peaked at 704.8 Mpps and appeared to originate from the same threat actor behind another record-breaking attack that Akamai blocked in July and that hit the same customer.

In January, Microsoft announced that its Azure DDoS protection platform has mitigated a record 3.47 Tbps attack that targeted one of its customers with a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps).

The attack took place in November and hit a customer in Asia, it originated from approximately 10,000 sources and from multiple countries across the globe, including the United States, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Taiwan.

The 3.47 Tbps attack was the largest one Microsoft has mitigated to date, likely the massive one ever recorded.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, distributed denial of service)