Akamai has reported that it mitigated the largest-ever distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on February 23, 2023, which peaked at 900.1 gigabits per second and 158.2 million packets per second.
The attack was targeted at a Prolexic customer in the Asia-Pacific region. Akamai was able to redirect the malicious traffic through its scrubbing network, with most of the traffic (48%) managed by scrubbing centers in the APAC region.
The attack was intense and short-lived, lasting only a few minutes, with most of the attack traffic bursting during the peak minute of the attack.
However, all of Akamai’s 26 centers were loaded during the attack, with only one center in HKG handling 14.6% of the total traffic. Nevertheless, Akamai claims there was no collateral damage thanks to its defense.
Akamai previously mitigated a record-breaking DDoS attack in September 2022, which hit a company customer in Europe, with the malicious traffic peaking at 704.8 million packets per second.
The attack appeared to originate from the same threat actor behind another record-breaking attack that Akamai blocked in July, which hit the same customer.
In January, Microsoft announced that its Azure DDoS protection platform had mitigated a record 3.47 terabits per second attack, which targeted one of its customers in Asia.
The attack was the largest one Microsoft had mitigated to date, likely the largest one ever recorded, and originated from approximately 10,000 sources from multiple countries across the globe.
