Microsoft just countered a record-breaking 3.47 Tbps DDoS attack on its Azure servers in Asia according to a blog post by the company. That, it says, is the largest mitigated attack in history.
According to Azure Networking product manager Alethea Toh, the attack occurred sometime in November, targeting an Azure customer in Asia. He believes this was the largest attack to ever be reported in history.
The attack originated from roughly 10,000 sources across the world, using a combination of multiple attack methods for UDP reflection on port 80 including, SSDP, CLDAP, DNS, and NTP. The attack lasted around 15 minutes.
But this isn't the only large attack Microsoft has had to deal with over the past few months. In December Microsoft also had to deal with another attack that was nearly as large at 3.25 Tbps, but lasted far longer.
According to Microsoft, these attacks, are part of an unprecedented amount of attacks seen over the course of the second half of 2021 around the world. In India alone, Microsoft saw a 30-fold increase in DDoS attacks in October. But that is just one part of the story
During the 2021 year, Microsoft has mitigated 40% more attacks in the second half of the year compared to the first half. On August 10th alone, Microsoft saw a whopping 4,296 attacks.
A big reason DDoS attacks have escalated so much during the end of 2021 is related to DDoS "for hire" services, which Microsoft notes, are incredibly cheap these days to acquire. Giving hackers more incentive to push more attacks.
Despite this, Microsoft has been able to thwart every single attack aimed at it thus far. Let's hope the company's team of highly skilled engineers can continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
