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Akamai Mitigates Largest DDoS Attack

Akamai DDoS Attack

Akamai, the internet security company, has successfully mitigated the largest ever distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. It was against a customer based in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. The attack came in to light on February 23, 2023. It peaked at 900.1 gigabits per second and 158.2 million packets per second. This made it an intense and short-lived attack lasting for about one minute.

What is a DDoS attack?

DDoS is a type of cyber attack that involves sending a large volume of fake requests. It is to target the server, depleting its capacity and rendering the websites, and applications. These attacks are usually made to cause business disruption for political purposes, retribution, competition interests, and geopolitical reasons. Also to extort the victim by delivering ransom demands.

Akamai’s DDoS attack mitigation strategy

To mitigate the attack, Akamai is scrubbing network, which is a DDoS mitigation measure. It involves a distributed infrastructure of many strategically located centers. These centers take incoming traffic and remove odd requests from the target’s network. Most of the garbage traffic was to Akamai’s scrubbing centers in Hong Kong, Tokyo, São Paulo, Singapore, and Osaka centers. 48% of the malicious traffic was dealt by scrubbing centers in the APAC region. Despite this all of Akamai’s 26 centers were facing issues. None were over 15% of the total traffic.

Akamai was able to handle the attack well, and the impacted customer experienced no direct or collateral damage. The services of the customer so not render inaccessible to legitimate customers, highlighting the effectiveness of Akamai’s DDoS mitigation strategy.

Record-breaking DDoS attacks

Akamai’s highest mitigation was on September 12, 2022, targeting a customer in Eastern Europe. That attack peaked at 704 million packets per second. It was about 4.5 times more than the recent event, but the volumetric figures aren’t available for that incident. However, Microsoft remains the record holder for the largest attacks ever mitigated. They defend against a massive 3.47 Tbps DDoS attack targeting an Asia-based Azure customer in November 2021.

Recently, Cloudflare successfully mitigated a DDoS attack against Wynncraft, one of Minecraft’s largest servers, that peaked at 2.5 Tbps, highlighting the increasing scale and frequency of such attacks.

Recap

Akamai’s successful mitigation of the largest ever DDoS attack launched against an APAC customer is a testament to their robust DDoS mitigation strategy. With the increasing frequency and scale of DDoS attacks, it is essential for companies to invest in reliable DDoS mitigation measures to protect their business operations and safeguard their customers’ data.

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