Above: Image by wbraga/123RF

Voxility, an international Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, stopped multiple 1Tbps+ waves of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on its customers’ digital infrastructure in July and August 2021. Unlike previous periods, DDoS attacks are being co-ordinated to start with extremely high volumes of traffic followed by frequent but low intensity attacks. The unusual pattern of attacks were focused on customers’ infrastructure in Asia and Europe and seem to have originated in China.

Some of the most notorious waves peaked at 1,130 gigabits per second (Gbps), 1,040 Gbps and 1,010 Gbps accompanied subsequently by lower intensity attacks averaging 800 – 990 Gbps over July and August months. These were made up of volumetric User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood, comprising abnormally large UDP packets, DNS amplification, and UDP packets without payload, to overwhelm infrastructure ports with bad IP traffic. In August 2021, the network operator mitigated its largest attack to date with a peak attack of 1,130 Gbps, targeting a European Cloud Service provider.

“The summer of 2021 has seen a significant increase in large DDoS attacks as threat actors continue to exploit new vulnerabilities exposed by the continued rush towards digitalization brought about by COVID-19 pandemic. While the motivations behind these huge attacks are unclear at this point, we have been proactive in deploying automated network solutions that adapt and evolve to manage and instantly mitigate these ever growing attack incidents,” said Maria Sirbu, VP of Corporate Communications at Voxility.

“During this summer, large 1Tbps+ attacks have become quite the norm, with major DDoS incidents mitigated every two days. As DDoS attacks increase in size and complexity, we are prepared to protect our customers’ services and applications and enable them to benefit from flexible and agile private infrastructure at the edge.”

Voxility offers anti-DDoS BGP tunnels for networks operating their own ASN as well as secure Ethernet uplinks with in-line DDoS filters. Its DDoS Protection enables traffic to be automatically and instantly filtered during an attack. The solution keeps critical online services safe from any type of DDoS attack, including Layer 7.