Technology
Microsoft warns it just blocked ‘BIGGEST cyberattack ever’ from ‘70,000 computers across Asia’ – including China
MICROSOFT has fought off the biggest “DDoS attack” in recorded history.
The huge cyberattack involved tens of thousands of computers – most of which were spread across Asia.
MicrosoftMicrosoft revealed a huge cyberattack that it was able to block[/caption]
Cyberattacks are increasingly common and highly sophisticated.
One of the most common types of cyberattack is a DDoS – or Distributed Denial of Service.
That’s when an attacker will flood a victim’s system with “internet traffic”, overloading it and forcing it offline.
This can be used to target websites, computer servers and even individual internet users.
Microsoft says this particular attack targeted one of its customers in Europe.
And said it was 140% stronger than the previous-highest attack in 2020.
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The attack flooded the system with 2.4 terabytes of data every second.
That’s compared to the 1Tbps attack in late summer last year.
A single terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, which itself amounts to the equivalent of hundreds of 4K movies.
Flooding a system with that amount of data every second is very hard to do.
According to Microsoft, the attack lasted around ten minutes.
“Attacks of this size demonstrate the ability to wreak havoc,” said Microsoft’s Amir Dahan.
“By flooding targets with gigantic traffic volumes trying to choke network capacity.”
Microsoft said that the attack came from computers sourced in China, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan and even the United States.
The company says its systems were able to block the attack on the customer.
“In this case, attack traffic which originated in the Asia-Pacific region and the United States did not reach the customer region,” Amir said.
“But was instead mitigated at the source countries.”
But it’s a worrying sign that DDoS cyberattacks are becoming more powerful.
Microsoft says it has also detected a 25% increase in the number of attacks since the last quarter of 2020.
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