Microsoft mitigates largest DDoS attack ever on Azure
Microsoft has thwarted the largest-ever distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on its Azure Cloud service that was recorded at 2.4 terabytes per second (Tbps).
The mega DDoS attack in the month of August was 140 per cent higher than the 1 Tbps attack in 2020, and higher than any network volumetric event previously detected on Azure, according to Amir Dahan, Senior Programme Manager, Azure Networking.
The attack traffic originated from approximately 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 US.
“The attack vector was a UDP reflection spanning more than 10 minutes with very short-lived bursts, each ramping up in seconds to terabit volumes. In total, we monitored three main peaks, the first at 2.4 Tbps, the second at 0.55 Tbps, and the third at 1.7 Tbps,” Dahan explained in a blog post on Monday.
Attacks of this size demonstrate the ability of bad actors to wreak havoc by flooding targets with gigantic traffic volumes trying to choke network capacity.
“However, Azure’s DDoS protection platform, built on distributed DDoS detection and mitigation pipelines, can absorb tens of terabits of DDoS attacks,” the company said.
The DDoS attack will send multiple requests to the attacked web resource, with the aim of exceeding the website’s capacity to handle multiple requests, and prevent the website from functioning correctly.
In the first half of 2021, Microsoft reported a 25 per cent increase in the number of DDoS attacks on Azure compared to Q4 of 2020.
