Akamai thwarted a new record DDoS attack on one of its European customers

Why is it important: Akamai thwarted a record-breaking DDoS attack on behalf of one of its customers. A few months ago, the victim already suffered a flood of malformed traffic as cybercriminals are now opting for a more distributed approach to try and bring down the targeted infrastructure.

Akamai Technologies has protected one of its Eastern European clients from a massive DDoS attack, a new record-breaking wave of malicious traffic attempting to bring down the company’s infrastructure. The content delivery network and cloud provider said the new attack is the worst ever recorded in Europe, with peak traffic of 704.8Mpps and more widespread targets compared to the previous attack.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack occurs when multiple “zombies” or bot systems fill up a target system’s bandwidth or resources using more than one unique IP address or computers—often from thousands of malware-infected hosts. It looks like the new attack comes from the same attacker, Akamai saidand he “bombed relentlessly” the same Eastern European company that was attacked in July at a rate of 659.6 million packets per second.

The new wave of corrupted Internet traffic exceeded the previous record attack by seven percent. The attackers targeted six different data centers located in Europe and North America. The number of unique IP addresses used as bots also rose from 512 to 1813 in 201 different cumulative attacks. “The attacker command and control system activated a multi-target attack without delay,” Akamai said, increasing the number of active IP addresses from 100 to 1813 per minute in just 60 seconds. The main targets of the attack were Hong Kong, London and Tokyo.

However, after the July incident, the customer was ready to defend itself: Akamai said that 99.8% of the attacks were prevented in advance thanks to proactive customer protection implemented by the Akamai Security Operations Control Center (SOCC). The remaining attack traffic and subsequent attacks coming from different vectors were then “quickly” mitigated by Akamai’s advanced security services.

Akamai also highlights the need to take the same proactive steps to protect data centers and cloud servers from the increasingly sophisticated threats flowing across the Internet. “An attack of this magnitude could drown an unprepared security team in alerts,” CDN said, “making it difficult to assess the severity and scale of an intrusion, let alone deal with an attack.”