Akamai said it had thwarted a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on US banks that peaked at 55.1 million packets per second earlier this month.
On September 5th, a flood of network traffic hit what Akamai called “one of the largest and most influential financial institutions in the United States,” an unnamed financial giant.
The attack lasted less than two minutes, according to cloud services firm Craig Sparling and Sandeep Rath, but the criminals used ACK, PUSH, RESET, and SYN flood attack vectors to skyrocket to 633.7 gigabits per second. Did.
“There was no collateral damage or degradation of service,” Sperling and Russ said, despite the flood of packets being sent to the bank’s primary web landing page in an attempt to disrupt online banking. Said just before the weekend.
This is Akamai’s third claimed “largest-ever” DDoS mitigation success story, but it’s worth noting that all of them have qualifiers. A year ago, Akamai thwarted a record DDoS attack against one of his European customers. The attack reached up to 704.8 Mpps and was his second attempt against the same Eastern European organization, though Akamai declined to even identify the organization’s name or industry due to security concerns.
Most recently, in February 2023, Akamai Largest DDoS attack For one of our customers in Asia Pacific. This network flood reached 900.1 Gbps and 158.2 Mpps at its peak.
This recent attack is said to be the largest ever against a US financial company.
For the record, Cloudflare claimed in February to block the single largest-ever DDoS event, which surged to over 71 million requests per second.
But, of course, records are made to be broken, and there is no doubt that botnets are waiting to unleash another wave of network tsunamis.
DDoS against banks is on the rise
Akamai researchers said: register It is unknown which cybercriminal organization or botnet is behind this latest DDoS incident. However, they pointed out that such floods of traffic aimed at destroying banks’ websites and businesses are on the rise.
Until now, only 10-15% of these types of attacks targeted bank customers. Technology companies, gaming companies, media/entertainment, and internet/communications providers typically bear the brunt of these security events.
“However, there has been a clear and noticeable spike in the number of DDoS attacks targeting financial institutions since 2021,” Sperling and Rath said.
“In fact, over the past four quarters, more than 30% of DDoS attacks targeted financial services companies,” they added.
DDoS floods, on the other hand, have become easier and cheaper for criminals to perform with the advent of DDoS-as-a-Service and rental botnets, requiring less technical know-how. Cloudflare has previously said that this type of service can be purchased for as little as $30 per month.
For this reason, they are also popular as so-called “cyber-attack smokescreens”. Triple extortion ransomware attacksays Akamai.
Triple extortion is an evolution of classic ransomware, where malware is dropped onto a victim’s machine and encrypts files, demanding a ransom to decrypt them. Next is double blackmail. In this case, the criminal steals the data before encrypting it and threatens to leak the information if the victim does not pay.
Criminals steal sensitive data, encrypt it with ransomware, and threaten your business with DDoS—a triple threat that puts even more pressure on your organization to pay the ransom.
“Financial institutions are important pillars of the economy, and targeting these companies often has a significant impact on the economy as a whole,” Sperling and Russ wrote. ®