Microsoft this week revealed that it had fended off a record number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks aimed at its customers in 2021, three of which surpassed 2.4 terabit per second (Tbps).
One of the DDoS attacks took place in November, targeting an unnamed Azure customer in Asia and lasted a total of 15 minutes. It hit a peak throughput of 3.47 Tbps and a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps), making it the largest attack ever reported in history.
“This was a distributed attack originating from approximately 10,000 sources and from multiple countries across the globe, including the United States, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Taiwan,” Alethea Toh, product manager of Azure Networking, said.
DDoS attacks occur when several compromised devices are employed as a conduit to overwhelm a targeted server, service, or network with a flood of internet traffic with the goal of overloading the systems and disrupting its regular services.
Then in December, Microsoft said it blocked two more attacks that surpassed 2.5 Tbps, both of which were aimed at customers in Asia. The first of the attacks was a 3.25 Tbps UDP attack, while the other intrusion was a 2.55 Tbps UDP flood that lingered for just a little over five minutes.
The report comes more than three months after the tech giant disclosed it acted to blunt a 2.4 Tbps DDoS attack in August 2021 targeting a European customer. Other previous record-breaking attacks include a 2.5 Tbps DDoS attack absorbed by Google in September 2017 and a volumetric strike aimed at Amazon Web Services in February 2020.
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