A bank in Europe was the target of a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that sent a flood of 809 million packets per second (PPS) requests to its network.
The attack could easily be a candidate as the largest DDoS attack to date, despite the fact that it is not a data-intensive attack, at just 418Gbps.
DDoS attacks vary depending on the method used to bring down the target. The intensity of attacks is measured in bits per second (BPS), packets per second (PPS), or requests per second (RPS).
BPS attacks aim to exhaust the internet pipeline, PPS is directed at network devices or applications in the data center/cloud, and RPS attacks target an edge server running a web application.
The DDoS attack was mitigated by Akamai on Sunday, June 21. The company did not reveal the name of the victim, stating simply that it was a large European bank.
The event lasted for a short period of time and increased in intensity within minutes. It took seconds to go from normal traffic to 418 Gbps.
It took about two minutes for the flood of requests to reach 809 million packets per second. In total, the attack lasted less than 10 minutes, Akamai said in a blog post today.
A new botnet is suspected for this attack. This conclusion is based on the high number of IP addresses involved in the attack appearing for the first time. 96.2% of them were previously unknown to Akamai.
Akamai says that during the incident, the platform recorded more than 600 times the normal amount of IP addresses normally seen for the customer.
Largest PPS DDoS attack
Akamai believes this is a new record for PPS-focused attacks. Compared to the previous largest attack recorded by the platform, which was 385 million PPS, this incident was more than double.
“This latest attack was clearly optimized to overcome DDoS mitigation systems through high PPS load,” Akamai says, adding that the packets sent carried a payload of just 1 byte out of a total of 29 packets via IPv4 headers, thus hiding them among many billions of peers.
The largest BPS DDoS attack published to date has reached the impressive scale of 2.3 Tbps and was mitigated by Amazon's AWS Shield service.
Prior to Akamai's report today, Imperva recorded the largest publicly known PPS DDoS attack on April 30, 2019. The peak was close to 580 million packets per second.
