This month, a company in Eastern Europe was the target of the biggest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever to impact Europe. The target, a client of Akamai, a cybersecurity and cloud service provider, has endured dozens of DDoS attacks during the last 30 days.
Since the beginning of the year, DDoS attacks have increased in frequency as attackers attempt to block access to the victim’s digital services by saturating them with traffic and requests that overwhelm resources and make them inaccessible. According to a recently-released report by Akamai, the record-breaking attack occurred on July 21. It reached its high of 853.7 Gbps (gigabits per second) and 659.6 Mpps in under 14 hours (million packets per second).
The business withheld information about its client but claimed to have been able to minimize the attack, which targeted several IP addresses and was the subject of 75 DDoS attacks in the previous 30 days. The most prevalent vector, which was also the one seen in both record spikes, was a UDP (user datagram protocol) flood.
Other techniques, such as UDP fragmentation, ICMP flooding, RESET flooding, SYN requests flooding, TCP anomalies, TCP fragments, PSH ACK flooding, FIN pushing flooding, and PUSH flooding, were also employed. According to Akamai, a “highly sophisticated global botnet” of compromised devices was the source of the DDoS attacks. The press recently focused on powerful botnets that can launch record-breaking DDoS attacks.
In September, the Mēris botnet slammed Russian internet juggernaut Yandex with 21.8 million RPS (requests per second). The Mantis botnet launched the most potent DDoS attack to date in June, peaking at 26 million RPS, which was neutralized by cloud services provider Cloudflare. It is still unknown why Akamai’s client was attacked. DDoS attacks in Eastern Europe have developed a political undertone due to the widespread deployment of these attacks for hacktivism.
