Microsoft mitigates record-breaking 3.47 Tbps DDoS attack

Microsoft this week revealed that it countered a record number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against its Azure customers. According to a blog post by the company, it is the largest mitigated attack in history.

The attack originated from roughly 10,000 sources across the world. It used a combination of numerous attack methods for UDP reflection on port 80, including SSDP, CLDAP, DNS, and NTP. The attack lasted around 15 minutes.

Azure Networking product manager Alethea Toh said, “This was a distributed attack originating from approximately 10,000 sources and from multiple countries across the globe, including the United States, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Taiwan”.

One of the DDoS attacks, which lasted 15 minutes and targeted an unknown Azure customer in Asia, occurred in November of last year. It had a peak throughput of 3.47 terabits per second (Tbps) and a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps), making it the largest cyberattack ever reported in history.

Then, in December, Microsoft announced that it had thwarted two further attacks with a combined bandwidth of more than 2.5 Tbps, both targeting Asian consumers. The first attack was a 3.25 Tbps UDP flood that lasted just over five minutes, while the second was a 2.55 Tbps UDP flood that lingered just a little over five minutes.

These attacks are part of an unprecedented number of attacks seen around the world in the second half of 2021, according to Microsoft. In October, the tech behemoth saw a 30-fold increase in DDoS attacks in India alone.

“Our customers do not have to worry about how to protect their workloads in Azure in these cases,” the company wrote in the report. “Azure’s DDoS protection platform, which is based on distributed DDoS detection and mitigation pipelines, can scale massively to absorb the biggest volume of DDoS attacks and provide our customers with the level of protection they require.”

The company also stated that its DDoS security services will continuously monitor its customers’ web services and cleanse any malicious traffic from the Azure network before it can disrupt services.

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