- Akamai announced that the DDoS attack that target the company’s victim peaked at 853.7 Gbps and 659.6 Mpps over 14 hours.
- The horizontal attacks consist of UDP, UDP fragmentation, ICMP flood, RESET flood, SYN flood, TCP anomaly, TCP fragment, PSH ACK flood, FIN push flood, and PUSH flood, among others.
- The attackers used a highly-sophisticated global botnet of compromised devices and no individual scrubbing center handled more than 100 Gbps.
Akamai detected and mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever recorded made against a European customer on the Prolexic platform on the 21st of July. It was a globally distributed attack that peaked at 853.7 Gbps and 659.6 Mpps over 14 hours. The attack was the largest global horizontal attack that was mitigated on the Prolexic platform.
853.7 Gbps and 659.6 Mpps over 14 hours
According to Akamai’s post, the customer in Eastern Europe was targeted 75 times in 30 days. Although the company didn’t share more details about the victim, it can be related to the war between Ukraine and Russia. The horizontal attack includes UDP, UDP fragmentation, ICMP flood, RESET flood, SYN flood, TCP anomaly, TCP fragment, PSH ACK flood, FIN push flood, PUSH flood, and more. The most popular vector observed during record spikes was UDP.
Akamai stated that the nature of the distributed attack traffic shows that cybercriminals were using a sophisticated global botnet of compromised devices during the attack. No individual scrubbing center handled more than 100 Gbps. The company also shared information about the strategy to mitigate the attack:
- Platform: a dedicated defense capacity that scales to several times the size of the largest publicly reported attacks
- People: more than 225 frontline responders across 6 global locations with decades of expertise who mitigate the most sophisticated attacks for the world’s largest, most demanding organizations
- Process: optimized DDoS incident response plans through custom runbooks, service validation, and operational readiness drills