Akamai reports mitigating the largest-ever distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against a customer based in the Asia-Pacific region.

DDoS is an attack that consists of sending a large volume of unnecessary requests to a targeted server, exhausting its capacity and thus making the websites, applications or other online services it hosts inaccessible to legitimate users.

These attacks are typically carried out to disrupt business, whether for political purposes, retaliation, competing interests, geopolitical reasons, or to extort the victim for ransom.

The record attack that Akamai recently mitigated ran on February 23, 2023, peaking at 900.1 gigabits per second and 158.2 million packets per second.

Akamai calls the attack intense and short-lived, with a peak lasting about a minute, consistent with current trends in the DDoS space.

The internet security company handled the attack well, dropping garbage traffic on its cleanup network, with most ending up in hubs in Hong Kong, Tokyo, São Paulo, Singapore and Osaka.

A scavenging network is a DDoS mitigation measure involving a distributed infrastructure of many strategically located hubs that take incoming traffic and remove unwanted requests from the target’s network.

Although 48% of malicious traffic was handled by cleanup centers in the APAC region, all 26 Akamai cleanup centers were loaded, but none exceeded 15% of total traffic.

Akamai affirms that the affected customer suffered no direct or collateral damage and that its services were not made inaccessible to legitimate customers.

Record DDoS Attacks

Akamai’s highest mitigation was a DDoS attack on September 12, 2022, targeting a customer in Eastern Europe.

This attack culminated in 704 million packets per secondapproximately 4.5 times more than the recent event, but volumetric figures are not available for this incident.

From this point of view, the record holder remains Microsoft, which, in November 2021, mitigated a massive 3.47 Tbps DDoS attack targeting an Azure customer based in Asia.

A recent case of this magnitude is a Cloudflare DDoS attack mitigation that targeted Wynncraft, one of Minecraft’s largest servers and peaked at 2.5 Tbps.