Posted on March 9, 2023 at 4:55 PM
Akamai mitigates the largest DDoS attack ever launched against a customer
There has been a notable increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Akamai has now reported that it mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever launched against one of its clients in the Asia Pacific region.
Akamai mitigates the largest DDoS attack
DDoS is a hacking campaign where large volumes of garbage requests are sent to a targeted server. These requests deplete the network’s capacity, which means that these websites, applications, and other online services hosted by the platform cannot be accessed by the legitimate user of these sites.
DDoS campaigns are usually done for various reasons, such as disrupting business. These campaigns could be politically motivated for retribution, competition, or geopolitical reasons. Sometimes, these hacking campaigns are done to extort money from the victim by demanding ransom payments.
The DDoS campaign that the Akamai cybersecurity company managed to mitigate happened on February 23, 2023. This DDoS attack peaked at 900.1 gigabits per second, equivalent to 158.2 million packets per second.
Akamai has said that the nature of this attack was intense and short-lived, with the peak of the exploit lasting for around one minute. This exploit matches the current trends that6 have happened in the DDoS sector.
The cybersecurity company noted that it handled this exploit well, adding that the garbage traffic was directed to its scrubbing network. Most of the traffic was directed toward the company’s centers in Hong Kong, Osaka, Sao Paulo, Singapore, and Tokyo.
Akamai is a scrubbing network used as a DDoS mitigation measure that the cybersecurity company uses. This measure involves a distributed infrastructure targeting most of the strategically located centers. This infrastructure involves centers that are strategically located.
These centers take incoming traffic, and they get rid of any unwanted requests from the targeted network. 48% of the malicious traffic in this exploit was handled using scrubbing centers in the APPAC region. All 26 centers used by Akamai were loaded, but none had more than 15% of the total traffic by the firm.
Mitigating the attack
“Without the right defenses, even a robust, modern network would likely collapse under an assault of this magnitude, making a online business that’s reliant on that connection completely inaccessible. That inaccessibility can jeopardize consume trust, result in financial loss, and have other serious ramifications,” the company said.
The company noted that it mitigated this exploit by a combination of platforms, people, and processes. The company deployed a dedicated defense system that has the ability to scale several times to the size of the largest attack that has ever been publicly reported.
The company also used over 225 frontline responders situated across six global locations to work on mitigating the DDoS campaign. The team has decades of experience in the sector, and they work on mitigating some of the largest attacks, even from the top organizations globally.
The process of optimizing against this DDoS campaign involved a response plan handled using custom runbooks, service validation and drills to ensure the systems are always ready to fight against these attacks.
Akamai said that there was no collateral damage in this exploit because the company deployed proactive defense measures for the client. The cybersecurity company also stressed the need to stay ahead in mitigating the latest security threats and taking measures to ensure that their operations are not crippled.
Mitigating against large DDoS attacks
The size of DDoS attacks has been increasing significantly in recent years. The largest DDoS attack that has ever been mitigated by Akamai happened on September 12 last year. This DDoS campaign targeted a customer based in Eastern Europe.
This attack was one of the largest that has ever been reported, as it peaked at 704 million packets per second, which was 4.5 times higher than the recent DDoS campaign. However, the transaction volumes in this attack are yet to be shared.
DDoS campaigns have targeted some of the largest tech giants globally. Microsoft has been the victim of the largest DDoS attack that has ever been reported. In November 2021, Microsoft mitigated a large DDoS campaign of 3.467 Tbps. This DDoS campaign targeted an Azure customer based in Asia.
Another recent case of a large DDoS campaign was one that was mitigated by Cloudflare. This DDoS attack targeted Wynncrafrt, which is one of the largest servers on Minecraft. The attack peaked at 2.5 Tbps.
