Akamai said that the attack on a bank earlier this week was the largest ever packet per second (pps) distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on its platform. The attack generated 809 million packets per second (Mpps). The targeted bank has not been revealed.
In a report, Akamai claimed this was a new industry record for pps focused attacks, and well over double the size of a previous attack it had mitigated.
What made attack unique, according to Akamai, was the massive increase in the amount of source IP addresses observed.
“The number of source IPs that registered traffic to the customer destination increased massively during the attack, indicating that it was highly distributed in nature. We saw upwards of 600x the number of source IPs per minute compared to what we normally observe for this customer destination,” the report said.