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 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), one of the largest packet-rate floods publicly disclosed. The malicious traffic was primarily a UDP flood launched from over 11,000 unique networks around the world, with attackers hijacking customer-premises equipment including IoT devices and home routers.

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, according to FastNetMon. Pavel Odintsov, Founder of FastNetMon, described this as part of a dangerous trend and stressed the need for detection logic at the ISP level to stop outgoing attacks before they scale. Thanks to these real-time defenses, users of the targeted site experienced no downtime or degraded performance.