Security News > 2020 > June > Akamai Mitigates Record 809 MPPS DDoS Attack
Akamai on Thursday revealed that it mitigated a second record-setting distributed denial-of-service attack since the beginning of June, one that peaked at 809 MPPS. Earlier this month, the company shared details on the mitigation of a 1.44 TBPS DDoS assault that reached 385 MPPS at its peak, but the more recent incident, which happened on June 21, was more than double the size in terms of PPS. The attack, which lasted just over 10 minutes, reached 418 GBPS within seconds, and 809 MPPS in two minutes.
Designed to overwhelm DDoS mitigation systems through a high PPS load, the attack involved the use of packets carrying 1 byte payloads, Akamai says.
Another unique characteristic of the attack was the use of a large number of source IP addresses.
Akamai, which tracks hundreds of thousands of source IPs abused for DDoS, says that the vast majority of the IPs used in the attack were not observed in previous 2020 incidents, suggesting that an emerging DDoS-capable botnet was behind the operation.
"Looking holistically at DDoS activity since the onset of 2020, it is clear that large, sophisticated DDoS attacks are still a significant attack vector," Akamai says.