This week Microsoft said it prevented several denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting its customers in 2021. Three of the attacks exceeded 2.4 terabits per second (Tbps).
In November, A DDoS attack occurred targeting an anonymous Azure customer in Asia, which lasted for about 15 minutes. The attack hit a peak and had a 3.47 Tbps speed; the packet rate was 340 million packets per second (pps), which was the largest attack ever recorded in history.
“This was a distributed attack originating 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,” Alethea Toh, product manager of Azure Networking, said.
DDoS attacks happen when several compromised devices are used as a conduit to inundate with internet traffic a targeted server, service, or network. The objective is to overload the systems and disrupt their regular services.
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In December, Microsoft said that it thwarted two more attacks that exceeded 2.5 Tbps. Both of the attacks were directed towards customers in Asia. The first attack was a 3.25 Tbps UDP attack, while the second was an intrusion clocked at 2.55 Tbps UDP lasting for a little more than 5 minutes.
The report comes after nearly three months from an attack in August 2021, reported by a tech giant. The attack was prevented and was a 2.4 Tbps DDoS attack targeting European customers. Other previous record-breaking attacks include a 2.5 Tbps DDoS attack absorbed by Google in September 2017 and a volumetric strike aimed at Amazon Web Services in February 2020.
Microsoft stated that it saw an increase in attacks lasting longer than an hour in the latter half of 2021, while attacks lasting less than 30n minutes dropped from 74% to 57%.
The gaming industry emerged as the hardest hit sector, followed by financial institutions, media, internet service providers (ISPs), retail, and supply chain entities. Most of the targeted organizations were located in the U.S., India, East Asia (Hong Kong), Brazil, the U.K., South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the U.A.E.
“We saw a sharp uptick in attacks in India, from just 2% of all attacks in the first half of 2021 to taking the second position at 23% of all attacks in the second half of 2021,” Toh said. “Another driving factor may be that the acceleration of digital transformation, for example, the ‘Digital India‘ initiative, has increased the region’s overall exposure to cyber risks.”
Reference
https://thehackernews.com/2022/01/microsoft-mitigated-record-breaking-347.html
