FastNetMon, a prominent provider of DDoS detection solutions, announced this week that it had identified and helped mitigate a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
The assault targeted a major DDoS scrubbing vendor located in Western Europe, pushing packet-forwarding rates to an astonishing 1.5 billion packets per second (1.5 Gpps).
This incident stands as one of the most intense packet-rate floods ever publicly disclosed. The attack was primarily a UDP flood, a standard method used by threat actors to overwhelm a target’s resources.
The malicious traffic originated from a vast and globally distributed botnet of compromised customer-premises equipment (CPE).
This network of hijacked devices included everyday electronics such as IoT gadgets and routers, spread across more than 11,000 unique networks around the world.
By harnessing a large number of devices, the attackers were able to generate a crippling volume of traffic directed at a single target, ironically, a company that specializes in defending against such events.
This massive packet flood comes just days after Cloudflare reported mitigating a separate, colossal 11.5 Tbps DDoS attack, signaling a clear and worrying escalation in the capabilities of cybercriminals.
While that attack focused on bandwidth volume (bits per second), the FastNetMon incident highlights a different but equally dangerous vector: packet volume (packets per second).
High packet-per-second rates are designed to exhaust the hardware and software resources of network equipment like routers and firewalls, which can only process a finite number of packets at any given time, regardless of their bandwidth.
“This event is part of a dangerous trend,” stated Pavel Odintsov, Founder of FastNetMon. He warned of the growing threat landscape where tens of thousands of insecure consumer devices can be weaponized into powerful, coordinated attack tools.
The system, which employs highly optimized C++ algorithms for real-time network traffic analysis, automatically identified the anomalous flood within seconds of its launch.
This immediate alert enabled the vendor to activate its mitigation protocols, successfully preventing any significant disruption to its services and protecting its infrastructure from being overwhelmed.
The incident highlights the crucial importance of high-speed, automated detection in an era of increasingly sophisticated DDoS threats.
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