Akamai recently reported on one of the largest DDoS attacks against a customer in the Asia-Pacific region, which was successfully mitigated by the company. During the attack, the targeted server received a massive influx of garbage requests, depleting its capacity. At its peak, the attack generated 900.1 gigabits per second and 158.2 million packets per second of traffic.

In September 2022, Akamai faced another record-breaking DDoS attack against a client in Eastern Europe, with a volume of packets sent per second reaching 704 million. The attack was distributed across Akamai’s scrubbing network, primarily originating in APAC, the most heavily targeted region. Despite this, the top five scrubbing centers for traffic accounted for less than 12% of the total traffic.

Akamai Prolexic’s industry-leading combination of platform, people, and processes helped mitigate the attack. The company’s dedicated defense capability, six global locations, and more than 225 frontline responders with decades of experience were crucial in thwarting the attack. The incident response plans for DDoS attacks were optimized by developing custom runbooks, performing service validations, and conducting operational readiness drills.

The Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recommends implementing mitigation controls for critical subnets and IP spaces in your network. DDoS security controls should be deployed in an always-on mitigation posture to reduce the burden on incident responders during an attack. Situation response plans and runbooks should be updated regularly to ensure they are responsive to changes in the situation.

Cloudflare also faced a massive DDoS attack against Wynncraft, a Minecraft server that is one of the largest in the world, peaking at 2.5 terabits per second. These attacks highlight the critical need for robust defense strategies against DDoS attacks.