Microsoft says it mitigated one of the largest DDoS attacks

In August, an Azure customer in Europe was targeted with a 2.4 Tbps DDoS attack, which was 140% higher than any network-volumetric event earlier detected on Azure, the software firm said.

October 13, 2021 02:40 pm | Updated 02:44 pm IST

Microsoft logo.

Microsoft logo.

Microsoft has managed to mitigate one of the largest Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks ever detected, the company said in a blog post.

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In August, an Azure customer in Europe was targeted with a 2.4 terabyte per second (Tbps) DDoS attack, which was 140% higher than any network-volumetric event earlier detected on Azure, the software firm said.

Also read | Microsoft: Russia behind 58% of detected state-backed hacks

The attack traffic originated from about 70,000 sources and from multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and China, as well as from the United States, the blog noted.

The DDoS attack spanned over 10 minutes with very short-lived bursts, the company said, adding that it observed three main peaks at 2.4 Tbps, 0.55 Tbps, and 1.7 Tbps.

DDoS attacks are aimed at disrupting the traffic of targeted servers by flooding them with enormous traffic volumes using numerous compromised computers in different locations. Such an attempt can choke the network capacity of the servers, unless it’s mitigated in timely manner.

Microsoft had reported in August that the number of DDoS attacks increased by 25% in the first half of 2021 compared to the fourth quarter of last year. Moreover, the largest attack bandwidth reported was 625 Gbps in H1 2021, down from 1 Tbps in Q3 of 2020.

Also read | Big Tech cloud services could face resilience test, says Bank of England

In 2017, Google mitigated a 2.54 Tbps DDoS attack , the largest ever recorded. Last year, Amazon Web Services safeguarded a 2.3 Tbps DDoS attack .

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