Top DDOS attacks in history — The Breakdown

Hello Folks,

Writing this article today to provide additional context or to BREAKDOWN the top attacks documented in internet to see where they actually land in terms of impact or mitigation strategies.

Without further delay, lets get into list of the attacks that shattered records in internet one by one:

1. Attack on Microsoft/Azure:
   At the time of writing this article, Largest ever Volumetric DDOS recorded was 3.47 Tbps DDoS targeting microsoft/Azure originated from connected devices in US and Asian countries. And by the zdnet article, it looks like it was successfully mitigated by azure team, that’s a impressive scrubbing capabilities from the cloud provider.
   Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-heres-how-we-stopped-the-biggest-ever-ddos-attack
2. CLDAP attack on AWS:
   AWS reported a massive DDoS attack around Feb 2020, this attack incoming traffic peaked up at rate of 2.3 Tbps. The attackers responsible used compromised Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol-CLDAP servers. is a protocol for user directories running on UDP port 389. Source: https://www.a10networks.com/blog/aws-hit-by-largest-reported-ddos-attack-of-2-3-tbps/
3. Memcached attack on Github:
   On Feb 2018, a DDOS zero day in open memcached servers were being exploited in wild which had a humongous amplification factor 51,200x - never seen before and immediately this was a DDOS chart buster by contributing to 1.35 Tbps.
   Source: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/ddos/memcached-ddos-attack/
4. Largest PPS based DDOS attack: As added by akamai, around June 2020 they mitigated a largest every ddos attack recorded in terms of PPS and it peaked at 809 M pps. This was targeted at network devices in line of their target.
   This links in depth analysis of the attack: https://www.akamai.com/blog/news/largest-ever-recorded-packet-per-secondbased-ddos-attack-mitigated-by-akamai
5. Monstrous RPS based DDOS attack: Cloudflare reported that it mitigated 17.2Mrps HTTP ddos traffic.
   Source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-thwarts-17-2m-rps-ddos-attack-the-largest-ever-reported/

I have collated these stats based on my own experience mitigating some similar attacks supporting with DDOS mitigation vendor/security newsletters found on the internet and there are many more such attacks, even bigger than these that aren’t reported anywhere for obvious reasons.

Thanks for checking in, see you all in another topic.