In an official blog post, Microsoft revealed that it likely faced the biggest distributed denial-of-service attack ever.
Microsoft’s Azure DDoS Protection team revealed that a torrent of junk data with a throughput of 3.47 terabits per second and a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps), targeted an Azure customer in Asia. The attack is believed to be the largest DDoS attack ever reported.
A Distributed Denial-of-Service is a kind of cyber attack in which an attacker tries to make a machine or network resources unavailable to their intended users by disrupting the services of the host connected to the network or machine. The attacks are commonly initiated by flooding the targeted machine or resource with multiple requests in an attempt to overload the system and prevent genuine requests from being fulfilled.
Microsoft reported that the DDoS attack, in November, came from 10,000 sources located in at least 10 countries. The countries included the United States, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Taiwan.
The overall attack lasted for approximately 2 minutes.
The official Azure blog states that the world experienced a high number of Distributed Denial of Service attacks in 2021. The gaming industry was the worst hit by these attacks that disrupted the gameplay of Blizzard games, Titanfall, Escape from Tarkov, Dead by Daylight, Final Fantasy, and many others.
The latest attack beat a 2.5Tbps attack mitigated by Microsoft earlier in 2021. Since then the company has mitigated three large attacks.
In December, Microsoft mitigated two attacks, both of which originated in Asia.
One was a 3.25 Tbps UDP attack that came in four bursts and lasted for more than 15 minutes. While the other was a 2.55 Tbps UDP flood attack with one single burst that lasted for almost 5 minutes.
Microsoft assured its customers they do not have to worry about protecting their workloads in Azure, given Azure’s DDoS protection platform. The platform is built on distributed DDoS detection and mitigation pipelines.
Azure’s DDoS protection platform is designed to scale exponentially to absorb the highest volume of DDoS attacks and provide consumers with the highest level of protection needed.
