French cloud computing firm OVHcloud said it mitigated a record distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in April 2024 that reached a packet rate of 840 million packets per second (Mpps).
This is slightly higher than the previous record of 809 million Mpps reported by Akamai as a major European bank in June 2020.
The 840 Mpps DDoS attack is said to have been a combination of a TCP ACK flood originating from 5,000 source IP addresses and a DNS mapping attack using around 15,000 DNS servers to pump traffic.
“Although the attack was distributed globally, 2/3 of the total packets came from just four (points of presence), all located in the US, with 3 of them on the West Coast,” OVHcloud noted. “This highlights an adversary’s ability to send huge packet rates over just a few peerings, which can be very problematic.”
The company said that since 2023, there has been a significant increase in DDoS attacks in terms of frequency and intensity, adding that speeds of more than 1 terabit per second (Tbps) have become commonplace.
“In the last 18 months, we’ve gone from fairly rare 1+ Tbit/s attacks to almost daily (a week on average),” said OVHcloud’s Sebastien Mériot. “The highest data rate we observed during this period was ~2.5 Tbps.”
Unlike typical DDoS attacks, which rely on sending a flood of unwanted traffic to a target in order to exhaust available bandwidth, packet-rate attacks work by overloading the packet-handling mechanisms of network devices close to the destination, such as load balancers.
Data collected by the company shows that DDoS attacks using packet rates of over 100 Mpps have increased dramatically over the same time period, with many originating from compromised MikroTik Cloud Core Router (CCR) devices. 99,382 MikroTik routers can be accessed via the Internet.
These routers, in addition to exposing the administration interface, run on outdated versions of the operating system, which makes them susceptible to known security vulnerabilities in RouterOS. It is suspected that threat actors are likely to use the bandwidth inspection feature of the operating system to carry out attacks.
It is estimated that even capturing 1% of exposed devices in a DDoS botnet could theoretically give adversaries enough opportunity to launch level 7 attacks reaching 2.28 billion packets per second (Gpps).
At this stage, it should be noted that MikroTik routers were loan funds to create powerful botnets like Mēris and is even used to run botnet operations as a service.
“Depending on the number of compromised devices and their actual capabilities, this could be a new era for packet-rate attacks: with botnets potentially capable of delivering billions of packets per second, this could seriously challenge how to build and scale infrastructure against DDoS,” Marriott said.
