In the past few weeks, an organization in Eastern Europe has been the victim of the biggest DDoS attack that the continent has ever experienced. During the past month, several DDoS attacks have been launched against the target, a customer of Akamai, as part of an ongoing assault.

Attackers are increasingly using DDoS attacks to deny access to victims’ digital services since the start of the year. As a result, they overwhelm resources and cause them to become unavailable by inundating them with requests and traffic.

The Akamai company recently announced that the attack that took place on July 21 has set a new record. The maximum bandwidth reached 853.7 Gbps and 659.6 Mpps within 14 hours.

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Here below we have mentioned the attack graphs:-

• 853.7 Gbps attack graph:

• 659.6 Mpps attack graph:

There were no details disclosed by the company about its customer in the statement. Over the past 30 days, the client has been the target of 75 DDoS incidents as a result of the attack but the company said that it had been able to mitigate the attack.

Both record spikes were observed to be induced by the UDP flood, which has been found to be the most popular vector. In addition to these methods, other methods have also been used, like:- 

• UDP fragmentation
• ICMP flood
• RESET flood
• SYN requests flood
• TCP anomaly
• TCP fragment
• PSH ACK flood
• FIN push flood
• PUSH flood

These DDoS attacks would have been launched by a globally-flooding botnet of infected devices that operate on a highly sophisticated network. There has been a lot of news lately about powerful botnets that have the ability to launch record-breaking DDoS attacks.

A Russian internet giant, Yandex, was hit by the Meris botnet last September, in which 21.8 million random packets were sent by the botnet. 

There was a DDoS attack in June that peaked at 26 million requests per second that were mitigated by cloud services company Cloudflare, which mitigates DDoS attacks.

There is no clear explanation for why a customer of Akamai was attacked. The use of DDoS attacks as a form of hacktivism has become increasingly popular in Eastern Europe as a result of incidents involving DDoS taking on a political tint.

Recommendations

The following recommendations will assist you in mitigating the risk of DDoS flooding:-

• The recommendations of the CISA should be reviewed and implemented immediately.
• In order to optimize mitigation controls for critical subnets and IP spaces, a review should be done and mitigation measures implemented.
• The first line of defense needs to be deployed in the form of DDoS security controls that are always on and active. 
• Make sure you get a cloud-based service provider right now if you do not have a trusted and proven provider yet. 
• Organize a team of crisis responders in a proactive manner.
• Maintain up-to-date runbooks and incident response plans in order to ensure successful execution.

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