Akamai has just mitigated a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack of epic proportions. While it was short-lived, it was very intense and most likely you could have easily taken the target server offline.
It was the largest DDoS attack ever launched against a target in the Asia-Pacific region. Despite the scale of the attack, Akamai was able to completely block it.
A DDoS attack consists of hundreds, if not thousands, of computers being used to send bogus requests to the target server. When such a large volume of requests hits the server out of the blue, affected websites or applications often go offline as a result. Even if they stay online, they are likely to respond very slowly. The scale of the problem depends on the size of the attack. Recently, a massive volumetric attack was carried out involving more than 30,000 computers.
This time, we don’t know how many different IP addresses were used to overwhelm the target server, but we do know that the number of requests per second was record high. According to Bleeping Computer, this was the largest DDoS attack ever made against a customer based in the Asia-Pacific region.
The attack took place on February 23, 2023. It peaked at 900.1 Gbps (gigabits per second) and 158.2 Mpps (million packets per second). The spike only lasted for about a minute and the total duration appears to have been around an hour.
Akamai reports that it was able to fully mitigate the attack. His client was not affected at all. To block the attack, Akamai used a cleanup network, which is a protection network that takes over incoming traffic to defend the target of a DDoS attack. Most of the traffic ended up at Akamai’s centers located in Tokyo, Osaka, Hong Kong, Singapore and São Paulo. Ultimately, Akamai used all of its 26 hubs to block this unprecedented attack.
While this was the largest attack against a target in the APAC region, there have been many other DDoS attempts that have been successfully mitigated in recent months. Akamai itself managed to stop a massive attack on a target in Eastern Europe that reached 659.6 Mpps.
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