Microsoft averts the greatest DDoS attempt against Azure in history, peak of 2.4Tbps

Think about the value for a second, 2.4 Tbps. Holy cow. According to a blog post published by Microsoft, the business was able to withstand an enormous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against an Azure user in Europe during the last week of August. 

A total of 2.4 terabits per second of requests were made to an unknown target in Europe during the peak of the distributed denial of service attack. It is the largest distributed denial of service attack that Microsoft Azure has ever seen.

Microsoft - The last week of August, we observed a 2.4 Tbps DDoS attack targeting an Azure customer in Europe. This is 140 percent higher than 2020’s 1 Tbps attack and higher than any network volumetric event previously detected on Azure.

Figure 1—maximum attack bandwidth (terabytes per second) in 2020 vs. August 2021 attack.

Figure 1—maximum attack bandwidth (terabit per second) in 2020 vs. August 2021 attack.

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.

Azure’s DDoS protection platform, built on distributed DDoS detection and mitigation pipelines, can absorb tens of terabits of DDoS attacks. This aggregated distributed mitigation capacity can massively scale to absorb the highest volume of DDoS threats, providing our customers the protection they need.