Microsoft Reports on how Azure AD Protects Users Against DDoS Attacks

Microsoft has recently unveiled that it mitigated one of the largest-ever-recorded DDoS attacks that targetted Asian Azure customers in November. The company says that the recent DDoS attack was launched from 10,000 sources in several countries, and it lasted for around 15 minutes.

For those unfamiliar, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a cyber-attack that occurs when an attacker prevents legitimate users from accessing a service, device, network, server, and application. Typically, these DDoS attacks cost organizations money as well as time and can last from a few hours to several months.

“In November, Microsoft mitigated a DDoS attack with a throughput of 3.47 Tbps and a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps), targeting an Azure customer in Asia. We believe this to be the largest attack ever reported in history. This was a distributed attack originating from approximately 10,000 sources and from multiple countries across the globe, including the United States, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Taiwan,” explained Alethea Toh, product manager at Azure Networking.

Microsoft blocked two massive DDoS attacks on Asian Azure customers in December

In addition to this, Microsoft reported two massive DDoS attacks targeting Asian Azure customers back in December. However, it appears the company was able to protect its users without any significant incidents.

The Redmond giant noted that there had been a significant rise in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks worldwide in the second half of 2021. It has become one of the popular techniques due to the high availability of incredibly cheap DDoS for-hire services. These attacks mainly targeted the gaming industry, financial services, media organizations, Voice-over-IP service providers, as well as supply-chain and retail businesses.

Microsoft claims that its Azure DDoS Protection service helps to block these attacks, and Azure customers shouldn’t worry about protecting their workloads. Azure DDoS Protection provides various security features such as automatic network attack mitigation, multi-layered protection, real-time metrics and alerts, Attack analytics, and more. “Azure’s DDoS protection platform can scale enormously to absorb the highest volume of DDoS attacks, providing our customers the level of protection they need,” Alethea Toh added.