Akamai reported that it has mitigated the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack ever launched against a customer based in the Asia-Pacific region.
The record-breaking attack that Akamai mitigated unfolded on February 23, 2023, peaking at 900.1 gigabits per second and 158.2 million packets per second. It was launched against a Prolexic customer in Asia-Pacific (APAC).
The attack was intense and short-lived, with its peak lasting for about one minute, which matches current trends in the DDoS space.
The internet security company handled the attack well, dropping the garbage traffic to its scrubbing network, with most ending up in Hong Kong, Tokyo, São Paulo, Singapore, and Osaka centers.
DDoS is an attack that involves sending a large volume of requests to a targeted server, depleting its capacity, and thus rendering the websites, applications, or other online services it hosts unreachable by legitimate users.
A scrubbing network is a DDoS mitigation measure involving a distributed infrastructure of many strategically located centers that take incoming traffic and remove unwanted requests from the target’s network.
Although 48% of the malicious traffic was handled by scrubbing centers in the APAC region, all of Akamai’s 26 centers were loaded, but none surpassed 15% of the total traffic.
Akamai says that the impacted customer experienced no direct or collateral damage, and their services weren’t rendered inaccessible to legitimate customers.
The previous record-breaking distributed denial of service attack mitigated by Akamai hit a company customer in Europe on September 2022.
That attack peaked at 704 million packets per second, about 4.5 times more than the recent event.
The record holder remains Microsoft, who mitigated a massive 3.47 Tbps DDoS attack targeting an Asia-based Azure customer in November 2021.
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