DDoS Mitigation Provider Hit by Massive 1.5 Billion Packets Per Second Attack

FastNetMon today announced it detected a record-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeting the website of a leading DDoS scrubbing vendor in Western Europe.

The attack peaked at 1.5 billion packets per second (1.5 Gpps), making it one of the largest packet-rate floods ever publicly disclosed.

The malicious traffic was primarily a UDP flood launched from over 11,000 unique networks around the world.

Attackers hijacked customer-premises equipment (CPE), including Internet of Things (IoT) devices and home routers, turning them into unwitting bots.

When devices in thousands of homes and offices sent packets in unison, they overwhelmed both the scrubbing vendor’s online defenses and internet links in the region.

This disclosure follows closely on the heels of Cloudflare’s mitigation of an 11.5 Tbps attack, underlining how adversaries are ramping up both volume and rate in their assaults.

While ...