Australia's Micron21 fends off a 90 Gbps DDoS attack

Australian data centre service provider Micron21 has mitigated a huge 90 Gbps DDoS attack using an anti-DDoS system from NSFOCUS.

The attack, which took place on 14 January, was the largest and broadest that Micron21 has faced to date. It consumed 23 terabytes of inbound data in only two and a half hours of sustained traffic load.

Had the attack succeeded, a full-scale outage would have cost up to $1.3 million. But using NSFOCUS’s suite, the company was able to maintain service continuity.

Micron21 deals with several Layer 3 to Layer 7 DDoS attacks on a daily basis, although most peak at 1 Gpbs in size. But the most recent attack greatly exceeded these past incidents, with attack traffic starting at 10 Gbps and rapidly increasing to 90 Gbps before receding to 40 Gbps.

“Welcome to the modern world — this is the painful reality for data centre operators everywhere, and why it’s absolutely critical for every corner of the industry to have solid DDoS mitigation capabilities in place,” NSFOCUS COO Allan Thompson commented.

Recent research from Akamai indicates that global DDoS attack activity surged 180% year-on-year during the third quarter to a new record number.

Image courtesy Linux Screenshots under CC