Microsoft shared a report about a set of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that occurred during the second half of 2021.
A DDoS attack aims to disrupt the regular traffic and speed of a service, network or server. It is carried out by hundreds or thousands of machines, often infected with malware and remotely controlled by attackers.
Machines continually send requests to the destination, overloading it with unexpected traffic. This often causes the server to crash or slow down considerably.
The blog article shared by Microsoft talks about the latest trends in DDoS attacks. AND2021 was an especially difficult year in terms of cybersecurity, and the last two quarters were especially bad. Attacks were much more frequent and increased in volume and complexity.
One of the biggest DDoS attacks ever mitigated took place in November 2020.1 and targeted an Azure customer located in Asia. It lasted fifteen minutes, and during that time, a large number of machines simultaneously sent packets to the Azure destination.
This attack had a transfer rate of 3.47 Tbps with a packet rate of 340 million packets per second. It involved over 10,000 sources, with packages shipped from all over the world, including China, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Russia, Iran, South Korea, and Taiwan. Microsoft believes this is the biggest attack on record.
In December, Microsoft also mitigated two other attacks targeting Asian customers. One of the attacks had a throughput of 3.25 Tbps and lasted over 15 minutes, while the other was capped at 2.55 Tbps and lasted just over five minutes.
Microsoft notes that in 2021, the gaming industry has suffered the worst of the DDoS attacks intercepted by Azure. Even with protective measures, many players have experienced DoS in games like Titanfall, Dead by Daylight, and a variety of other Blizzard games.
Microsoft saw an increase of up to 43% over the first two quarters of the year. Combined, the company mitigated 359,713 attacks during the third and fourth quarters of 2021.
Microsoft reports that the majority of attacks targeted the United States (54%). India has also been hit hard and has seen a massive increase from just 2% in the first half of 2021 to 23% in the second. Other destinations include East Asia, Europe, Southeast Asia and other parts of the world.