Akamai Thwarted Record DDoS attack

Akamai has thwarted record-breaking DDoS assault in Europe with attack traffic spiking to 704.8 Mpps to cripple the organization’s business operations.

Akamai stated that the recent attack originate from same threat actor behind that Akamai blocked in July. Notably, it attacked the same customer.

On Monday, September 12, 2022, Akamai successfully detected and mitigated the now-largest DDoS attack ever launched against a European customer on the Prolexic platform, with attack traffic abruptly spiking to 704.8 Mpps in an aggressive attempt to cripple the organization’s business operations.

Akamai Advisory

The number of cumulative attacks was 75 in July and in September it jumped up to 201. In this particular attack the attackers launched the attack against 6 data center locations from Europe to North America.

These attacks culminated at extraordinary levels on September 12, when the garbage traffic sent to the target network peaked at 704.8 Mpps, about 7% higher than the July attack.

To mitigate these large magnitude attack, Akamai leveraged a balanced combination of automated and human mitigation: 99.8% of the assault was pre-mitigated due to customer’s proactive defensive posture, a preemptive security measure implemented by the Akamai Security Operations Command Center.

The attackers’ C2 system had no delay in activating the multidestination attack, which escalated in 60 seconds from 100 to 1,813 IPs active per minute”, Akamai.