Microsoft Azure Cloud has explained how it stopped the biggest-ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack at 3.47 terabytes (Tbps) per second.
The DDoS attack with a throughput of 3.47 Tbps and a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps), targeting an Azure customer in Asia, originated from approximately 10,000 sources and from multiple countries across the globe, including the US, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia and Taiwan.
The overall attack lasted approximately 15 minutes and was successfully mitigated.
“We believe this to be the largest attack ever reported in history,” Alethea Toh, Product Manager, Azure Networking, said in a blog.
Last October, Microsoft reported on a 2.4 terabit per second (Tbps) DDoS attack in Azure that it successfully mitigated.
The two other large attacks that surpassed 2.5 Tbps in December were also short bursts targeting servers in Asia.
Most attacks in the first half of 2021 were short-lived. The proportion of attacks that were 30 minutes or less dropped from 74 percent to 57 percent in the second half of 2021, Microsoft said.
“We saw a rise in attacks that lasted longer than an hour, with the composition more than doubling from 13 percent to 27 percent. Multi-vector attacks continue to remain prevalent,” Microsoft said.
For longer attacks, each attack is typically experienced by customers as a sequence of multiple short, repeated burst attacks.
The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) attacks rose to the top vector in the second half of 2021, comprising 55 percent of all attacks, a 16 percent increase from the first half of 2021.
The gaming industry has been hit with multiple DDoS attacks this year.
The gaming industry has always been rife with DDoS attacks because players often go to great lengths to win. Nevertheless, we see that a wider range of industries are just as susceptible, as we have observed an increase in attacks in other industries such as financial institutions, media, internet service providers (ISPs), retail, and supply chain, Microsoft said.
A DDoS attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources.
