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Microsoft recently said that it successfully handled a 2.4 TB per-second distributed denial-of-service assault against an Azure client, the world’s largest DDoS attack in history.

Countries involved in the attack

Nearly 70,000 sources across many countries in Asia-Pacific, including Japan, Taiwan, China, and the United States, were under attack. The attack vector was a supposed UDP reflection that lasted over 10 minutes and consisted of very brief bursts that increased the terabit levels in seconds.

The previous DDoS traffic record was 2.3 Tbps, set in a February 2020 attack on Amazon Web Services. The previous record for an assault on Azure was 1.6 Tbps.

Who was the victim

The identity has not been revealed of the targeted Azure customer. The only information disclosed was that the activity took place in Europe.

The announcement of the attack came after Microsoft disclosed in August that DDoS attacks on Azure per day had climbed by 25% in the first half of the year. On average, Microsoft neutralized 1,392 assaults per day, with the highest total of 2,043 attacks on May 24.

Official statement on the attack

Amir Dahan, senior program manager at Azure Networking, said that the episode highlights bad actors’ ability to create chaos by engulfing targets in massive traffic volumes and choking network capacity.

“However, Azure’s DDoS protection platform, built on distributed DDoS detection and mitigation pipelines, can absorb tens of terabits of DDoS attacks,” Dahan noted.

The top cloud vendors provided the most extensive DDoS protection, namely AWS and Azure, Kolochenko further added. “All premium features are quite costly; however, they offer amazing value for money compared to other solutions.”