Microsoft: Azure platform hit by 2.4 TB / sec DDoS attack

Microsoft reported that it dealt with a record 2.4 TB / sec DDoS attack at the end of August targeting an unnamed European client of the Azure platform. The DDoS attack used approximately 70,000 bots, mainly from the Asia-Pacific region (Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and China) and the United States.

Microsoft says that the DDoS attack was split into three short waves and lasted about ten minutes: the first wave with a capacity of 2.4 TB / sec, the second – 0.55 TB / sec, and the third – 1.7 TB / sec.

Let me remind you that the previous records in the field of successfully repelled DDoS attacks belonged to Amazon AWS (last year the company coped with an attack with a capacity of 2.3 Tb / s) and Google Cloud (back in September 2017, the service repelled an attack whose peak power reached 2,54 TB / sec).

Also, do not forget about the Mēris botnet, which recently attacked Yandex. The botnet uses a slightly different tactic: These attacks are usually called “volumetric” attacks and they differ from classic DDoS attacks as attackers focus on sending as many unwanted HTTP requests as possible to the victim’s server in order to load its CPU and RAM, preventing users from using targeted sites. The power of the attack on Yandex was over 20 million requests per second.

Experts have long been saying that the number and power of DDoS attacks are steadily growing. For example, in early August of this year, Azure experts wrote that in the first half of 2021, Microsoft discovered a sharp increase in daily DDoS attacks: their number increased by 25% compared to the fourth quarter of 2020. During this period, the Azure DDoS Protection team responded with 251,944 unique attacks targeting the global Azure infrastructure.

Let me remind you that Yandex also spoke about the largest DDoS attack in the history of the Internet.