Akamai mitigated a record-breaking DDoS attack that peaked 900Gbps

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)

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”.