Akamai reports that it successfully stopped what would have been a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeting a customer in Eastern Europe.
This follows a recent pattern: last month Cloudflare described thwarting a record DDoS attack in June, and now Akamai has announced a separate, large-scale mitigation. According to Akamai, one undisclosed organization experienced sustained malicious traffic for a 30-day campaign that peaked on July 21 at 659.6 million packets per second (Mpps) and 853.7 Gbps.
“Akamai detected and mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever launched against a European customer on the Prolexic platform, with globally distributed attack traffic peaking at 853.7 Gbps and 659.6 Mpps over 14 hours,” the company said. The attack targeted a broad range of the customer’s IP addresses and was described as the largest global horizontal attack the Prolexic platform has handled.
Akamai did not identify the customer or the specific country, only noting the organization was based in Eastern Europe. Over the 30-day period, the customer was targeted 75 times. The attack traffic included a variety of vectors such as UDP and UDP fragmentation, ICMP flood, RESET flood, SYN flood, TCP anomalies and fragments, PSH ACK floods, FIN push floods, and other PUSH-style floods.
Similar to Cloudflare’s analysis of its June incident, Akamai suggests the campaign likely relied on a sophisticated, globally distributed botnet composed of compromised devices. The company emphasized its proactive mitigation approach: “To thwart the attack and safeguard our customer, Akamai Prolexic employed its industry-leading combination of technology, people, and processes to pre-mitigate the assault with no collateral damage thanks to our proactive defense posture for this customer.”
Post-incident analysis by Cloudflare indicated that the prior massive attack probably used hijacked virtual machines and powerful servers rather than the low-power IoT devices commonly associated with modern botnets. Whether Akamai reaches the same conclusion about this campaign remains to be seen, but both incidents underscore that DDoS attacks are increasing in scale and potential impact.
(Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash)
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