Microsoft said on Monday that an Azure customer was the victim of a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack at the end of August. It peaked at 2.4 Tbps (terabytes per second).
The operation comprised UDP traffic, employed reflection, and was 1.4 times greater than the most significant attack previously neutralized by Azure. It originated from about 70,000 sources globally and lasted for more than 10 minutes, with very brief bursts of high activity.
The majority of the attack’s origin servers were in Asia, including China, Malaysia, Japan, Vietnam, and Taiwan. Microsoft said that some of them were based in the U.S.
According to the tech giant, the attack reached three primary spurts, peaking at 2.4 Tbps, 0.55 Tbps, and 1.7 Tbps, respectively.
The number of DDoS attacks recorded in the first half of 2021 grew by about 25% compared to the last three months of 2020, according to a study issued in early August by the IT giant. However, the maximum attack throughput dropped.
The recently reported event is one of the biggest network layer DDoS attacks in recent years, with a throughput of 2.4 Tbps. However, Azure is prepared to handle even much bigger attacks, according to Microsoft:
“Attacks of this size demonstrate the ability of bad actors to wreak havoc by flooding targets with gigantic traffic volumes trying to choke network capacity. However, Azure’s DDoS protection platform, built on distributed DDoS detection and mitigation pipelines, can absorb tens of terabits of DDoS attacks. This aggregated distributed mitigation capacity can massively scale to absorb the highest volume of DDoS threats, providing our customers the protection they need.”
Just days after the Mirai botnet established the record at 1.3 Tbps, the Memcached DDoS technique was used in a 1.7 Tbps Dos attack in 2018.
In June of last year, Amazon stated that it had successfully neutralized a 2.3 Tbps DDoS attack that had occurred some months prior. Google said in October 2020 that it was the victim of the world’s biggest DDoS attack in September 2017. It peaked at 2.5 Tbps.
Microsoft says that attacks of this magnitude illustrate bad actors’ abilities to cause chaos by flooding targets with massive traffic volumes in an attempt to suffocate network capacity.
