DDoS Mitigation Provider Hit by Massive 1.5 Billion Packets Per Second Attack

 FastNetMon today announced it detected a record-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeting the website of a leading DDoS scrubbing vendor in Western Europe.

The attack peaked at 1.5 billion packets per second (1.5 Gpps), making it one of the largest packet-rate floods ever publicly disclosed.

The malicious traffic was primarily a UDP flood launched from over 11,000 unique networks around the world.

Attackers hijacked customer-premises equipment (CPE), including Internet of Things (IoT) devices and home routers, turning them into unwitting bots.

When devices in thousands of homes and offices sent packets in unison, they overwhelmed both the scrubbing vendor’s online defenses and internet links in the region.

This disclosure follows closely on the heels of Cloudflare’s mitigation of an 11.5 Tbps attack, underlining how adversaries are ramping up both volume and rate in their assaults.

While Cloudflare’s attack measured in terabits of bandwidth, FastNetMon’s event illustrates a focus on packet rate rather than raw data volume.

A flood of small UDP packets can strain network devices and firewalls even more severely than large-volume floods, since each packet demands processing power.

“This event is part of a dangerous trend,” said Pavel Odintsov, Founder of FastNetMon. “When tens of thousands of CPE devices can be hijacked and used in coordinated packet floods of this magnitude, the risks for network operators grow exponentially.

The industry must act to implement detection logic at the ISP level to stop outgoing attacks before they scale.” His call highlights the need for internet service providers to spot and block suspicious traffic close to the source.

FastNetMon’s Advanced platform is built for attacks of this scale. Using highly optimized C++ algorithms for real-time network visibility, the system can detect sudden spikes and anomalies within seconds.

In this case, FastNetMon enabled its customer to spot the flood almost immediately, triggering automatic mitigation steps that rerouted or dropped malicious traffic before it could disrupt service.

Thanks to these real-time defenses, users of the targeted site experienced no downtime or degraded performance.

As DDoS attacks continue to grow in both size and sophistication, organizations must strengthen their defenses at multiple layers.

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