Akamai Mitigates Record DDoS Attack in Asia-Pacific

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the cloud company that powers and protects life online, revealed that Akamai mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever launched against a customer based in Asia. In a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, an attacker overwhelms its target with unwanted internet traffic so that normal traffic cannot reach its intended destination.

Fig. 1: The attack was intense and short-lived, and was fully pre-mitigated
On February 23, 2023, Akamai mitigated the attack which recorded traffic peaking at 900.1 gigabits per second and 158.2 million packets per second. The attack was intense and short-lived, with most attack traffic bursting during the peak minute of the attack. Traffic patterns returned to normal after only a few minutes (Figure 1).

The attack was distributed across Akamai’s scrubbing network, with all 26 of Akamai’s fleet of scrubbing centers witnessing some amount of attack traffic. However, this was most heavily sourced from APAC (Figure 2), with the top locations being Hong Kong, Tokyo, São Paulo, Singapore, and Osaka, and forty-eight percent of traffic in-region.

Mitigation strategy

To thwart the attack and safeguard the customer, Akamai Prolexic, a cloud-based DDoS scrubbing platform, was deployed to pre-mitigate the assault. The dedicated defense platform, that scales to several times the size of the largest publicly reported attacks, was deployed after an optimized DDoS incident response plan was launched by frontline responders. Over 225 frontline responders across six global locations with decades of expertise mitigating the most sophisticated attacks for the world’s largest, most demanding organizations, were involved to stop the attack. As a result of the proactive defense posture, there was no collateral damage for the customer.

“The recent DDoS attack that Akamai mitigated in Asia serves as an important reminder that DDoS continues to be a pervasive threat that organizations here need to pay...