On June 21, 2020, Akamai mitigated what it claims is the largest ever packet per second (pps) distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Akamai platform, said the Company in a statement.
The attack generated 809 million packets per second (Mpps), targeting a large European bank. According to Akamai, the latest attack was clearly optimized to overwhelm DDoS mitigation systems via high pps load. The packets sent carried a meager 1 byte payload (for a total packet size of 29 with IPv4 headers), making it appear like every other one of its several billion peers.
DDoS attacks are almost always volumetric in nature, and generally measured in bits per second (bps). The DDoS attacker’s goal is to overwhelm the inbound internet pipeline, sending more traffic to a circuit than it is designed to handle. In contrast, packet per second (pps) focused attacks are largely designed to overwhelm network gear and/or applications in the customer’s data center or cloud environment, said Akamai. Both are volumetric, but packet per second attacks exhaust the resources of the gear, rather than the capability of the circuits. Packet per second attacks are much less common.
The latest attack was remarkable not only for its size, but also because of the speed at which it reached its peak. The attack grew from normal traffic levels to 418 Gbps in seconds, before reaching its peak size of 809 Mpps in approximately two minutes. In total, the attack lasted slightly less than 10 minutes, and was fully mitigated by Akamai’s proactive mitigation controls.
