The largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that Europe has ever seen occurred earlier this month and hit an organization in Eastern Europe.
The target, a customer of cybersecurity and cloud service company Akamai, has been under constant assault, facing dozens of DDoS rounds over the past 30 days.
DDoS incidents have become more frequent since the start of the year as attackers try to deny access to the victim’s digital services by flooding them with requests and traffic to overwhelm resources and render them unavailable.
In a report this week, Akamai notes that the record-breaking attack occurred on July 21 and in 14 hours it peaked at 853.7 Gbps (gigabits per second) and 659.6 Mpps (million packets per second).
The company did not disclose any details about its customer but said that it was able to mitigate the attack and said that it targeted several IP addresses and that its client was the target of 75 DDoS incidents over the past 30 days.
UDP (user datagram protocol) flood was the most popular vector and also the one observed in both record spikes.
However, other methods were used, including UDP fragmentation, ICMP flood, RESET flood, SYN requests flood, TCP anomaly, TCP fragment, PSH ACK flood, FIN push flood, and PUSH flood.
Akamai says that the DDoS attacks originated from a “highly-sophisticated global botnet” of infected devices. Powerful botnets capable of record-breaking DDoS attacks have been in the news recently.
Last September, the Mēris botnet was responsible for hitting Russian internet giant Yandex with 21.8 million RPS (requests per second). In June, cloud services company Cloudflare mitigated a DDoS attack from Mantis botnet that peaked at 26 million RPS, making it the most powerful one to date.
The reason for attacking Akamai’s customer remains unclear. DDoS incidents in Eastern Europe have taken a political tint as they are frequently used as a form of hacktivism.
