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A powerful botnet has flexed its muscles once again by launching a massive 15.7 Tbps DDoS attack against a customer on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.
The incident occurred on Oct. 24, with Microsoft indicating it involved over 500,000 devices generating internet traffic in an attempt to knock a target offline.
The company traced the DDoS to the "Aisuru" botnet, which was responsible for the largest DDoS on record back in September. That attack peaked at 22.2 Tbps, while also pushing 10.6 billion packets per second from over 300,000 devices. It targeted a customer on Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure company that also provides DDoS protection.
The Oct. 24 attack targeted a single endpoint based in Australia. Microsoft didn’t elaborate, but it looks like the company automatically mitigated the impact, preventing it from overwhelming its services. “Malicious traffic was effectively filtered and redirected, maintaining uninterrupted service availability for customer workloads,” it said in a blog post.
Operating since at least last year, Aisuru has made a name for itself by launching record-breaking DDoS attacks. The botnet hijacks internet-connected devices, such as vulnerable home routers and internet cameras across the globe, and then uses them in DDoS attacks, which try to overwhelm a website, mobile app, or server with a flood of internet traffic.
Aisuru's creators sell access to the botnet, mainly so buyers can attack game servers, including those used for Minecraft. In late September, the botnet appeared to have launched a more powerful DDoS that reached 29.6 Tbps, but it was merely for demonstration purposes, according to security journalist Brian Krebs.
It used to be rare for DDoS attacks to exceed 1Tbps. But as Internet of Things (IoT) devices proliferate, more of them have access to faster networks, paving a way for botnets to access greater firepower.
“Attackers are scaling with the internet itself. As fiber-to-the-home speeds rise and IoT devices get more powerful, the baseline for attack size keeps climbing," Microsoft says.