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Microsoft shrugged off a 2.4Tbps DDoS attack in August

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks can bring services down and in 2020 we saw that DDoS attacks were proving rather popular among ne’er-do-wells.

Back in August 2021 Microsoft reported that it had seen a 25 percent increase in the number of attacks compared to Q4 2020.

At the end of August though, Microsoft observed a massive DDoS attack against an Azure customer located in Europe. The attack measured in at 2.4Tbps, 140 percent higher than a 1Tbps attack in 2020.

“The attack traffic originated from approximately 70,000 sources and from multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and China, as well as from the United States. The attack vector was a UDP reflection spanning more than 10 minutes with very short-lived bursts, each ramping up in seconds to terabit volumes. In total, we monitored three main peaks, the first at 2.4 Tbps, the second at 0.55 Tbps, and the third at 1.7 Tbps,” said senior program manager at Azure Networking, Amir Dahan.

According to Microsoft, its Azure DDoS protection platform is able to mitigate DDoS attacks and effectively absorbs tens of terabits of DDoS attacks. The protection is orchestrated through Azure’s control plane logic which is able to dynamically allocate mitigation resources closest to where the attack is originating.

“Azure’s DDoS mitigation employs fast detection and mitigation of large attacks by continuously monitoring our infrastructure at many points across the network. When deviations from baselines are extremely large, our DDoS control plane logic cuts through normal detection steps, needed for lower-volume floods, to immediately kick-in mitigation. This ensures the fastest time-to-mitigation and prevents collateral damage from such large attacks,” Dahan explains.

While Microsoft didn’t disclose who the Azure client who was targeted is, this sort of incident helps to hammer home the importance of adequate cybersecurity, business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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