Two Powerful DDoS Attacks Prevented by Gcore

Massive cyber-crime attempt reaching 1.6 Tbps thwarted by Gcore, no impact on customer service

Gcore a European provider of public cloud and edge computing, content delivery, hosting, security, and AI solutions earlier this month combatted two consecutive DDoS attacks against a customer, which was able to maintain its services seamlessly throughout.

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The attacks, which were against a gaming company, were conducted using novel techniques and reach up to 1.6Tbit/s, had the power to overwhelm the company’s servers with traffic, effectively taking them offline.

The approach, which involved using random UDP source ports, suggests that the attackers were aiming to evade conventional filtering mechanisms. However, they also concealed their identity by forging source IP addresses. The first, short-lived, attack attempted to flood the company’s network with data, while the second was TCP-based and spanned almost nine hours.

Gcore’s DDoS Protection was able to neutralise both cyber attempts using a combination of dynamic traffic shaping, anomaly detection and quarantine, implementing custom regular expression-based filters and access to collaborative threat intelligence.

“By any measure, a DDoS attack of more than 1.5 Tbps is huge and represents a major threat to any company,” said Andre Reitenbach, CEO at Gcore. “We tap into a range of front-line defences that not only allow us to thwart attacks, but also ensure online services are uninterrupted. For this customer, we prevented any damage to their system and their reputation but what the attack demonstrates is that we are facing increasingly clever approaches from cyber criminals looking for ways to bypass cyber-security protections.”

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The most recent Gcore Radar Report (Q1 & Q2 2023), which provides insights into the current state of the DDoS protection market and cybersecurity trends, found a dramatic increase in DDoS attacks across multiple industries. At the beginning of 2023, the average strength of attacks reached 800 Gbps, but this number has now doubled. The most common form of attack was a UDP flood attack, and during the first half of this year, the longest duration of attack was over seven days. Most attacks, the report found, lasted less than four hours.