Akamai Sees Europe’s Biggest DDoS Attack to Date

Akamai recently mitigated a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that set a new record for attacks targeting European organizations in terms of packets per second.

Identified and thwarted on September 12, the assault peaked at 704.8 million packets per second (Mpps) and represented the second record-setting DDoS attack targeting the same customer over the past three months.

In July, after being at the receiving end of 74 DDoS attacks, the organization was the target of a 659.6 Mpps DDoS assault. Since then, it was targeted with 201 other DDoS attacks, Akamai says.

While it was not the largest to date, the September DDoS assault did set a new record for DDoS attacks targeting European entities, the internet giant notes.

As part of the incident, attackers targeted over 1,800 IP addresses belonging to the same organization, distributed at 6 different locations.

“Prior to June 2022, this customer only saw attack traffic against its primary data center; however, […] the attack campaign expanded unexpectedly, hitting six different global locations, from Europe to North America,” Akamai explains.

The attackers mainly relied on UDP as the DDoS vector for this attack, but were also seen using ICMP, RESET, and SYN floods, TCP anomaly and fragment, and PUSH flood, among other vectors.

“Adversaries are constantly evolving their techniques, tactics, and procedures to evade detection and maximize disruption, as demonstrated by this ongoing attack campaign,” Akamai notes.

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