Massive DDOS Attack With 419 TB of Malicious Traffic Hits in 24 Hours

August 8, 2024

On July 15, 2024, a major Israeli financial services company endured a nearly 24-hour, high-volume, sophisticated DDoS attack, one of the largest ever recorded.

The attacker leveraged unprecedented resources, signaling a potential precursor to more severe future attacks. Concurrently, other Israeli financial institutions experienced outages, suggesting a coordinated campaign targeting the sector.

A massive, 24-hour DDoS attack targeting an Akamai customer on July 15th, 2024, unleashed a sustained barrage of up to 798 Gbps of malicious traffic, employing diverse attack vectors including UDP flood, fragmentation, DNS reflection, and PSH+ACK.

Originating from a globally distributed botnet, this attack ranks as the sixth largest ever, delivering a staggering 419 terabytes of attack traffic over the day, highlighting the increasing sophistication and scale of DDoS threats.

The initial and small probing attack was followed by a three-hour attack window.

DDoS attacks typically last only minutes, exploiting the difficulty of rapid defense response and the high cost-efficiency of short, intense attacks.

However, this specific DDoS attack deviated from the norm by lasting three hours, increasing the complexity of analysis and response for the victim’s security team while potentially maximizing attack impact and requiring greater computational resources from the attacker.

A sophisticated attacker leveraged a globally distributed botnet to launch a sustained, multi-vector Layer 3 and Layer 4 DDoS attack targeting over 278 IP addresses simultaneously.

Unlike random cyberattacks, this was a deliberate, coordinated assault on multiple financial institutions within a specific country, demonstrating the aggressor’s significant resources and advanced capabilities in executing a prolonged, high-volume attack.

Distinct IP addresses targeted by the July 15 DDoS attack

A sophisticated actor has launched multiple, exceptionally large-scale DDoS attacks, demonstrating unprecedented resources and capabilities that have overwhelmed existing defense mechanisms, exposing vulnerabilities in the cybersecurity infrastructure.

The attacker’s ability to mount such potent assaults repeatedly highlights a critical threat to global networks, as they possess the knowledge and means to target other systems with potentially even greater force.

Israeli organizations have faced an unprecedented surge in DDoS attacks in 2024, especially since the Q4 2023 conflict onset.

A financial services client has endured 27 significant DDoS attacks in the past 90 days, with the largest reaching 330 Gbps, which highlights the escalating threat landscape for Israeli businesses, requiring robust DDoS protection measures.

EMEA’s DDoS attack event numbers are increasing more steadily than any other region’s numbers, including North America’s.

Recent DDoS attacks targeting financial institutions in Israel, potentially linked to regional conflicts, demonstrate a global threat landscape. Attackers possessing sophisticated capabilities and resources can target any organization worldwide, regardless of industry or location.

The EMEA region has experienced a significant surge in DDoS attacks since 2019, surpassing North America in overall attack volume, highlighting a critical need for enhanced global cybersecurity measures.

According to Akamai, organizations relying solely on on-premises DDoS appliances or shared DDoS protection from hosting providers face a heightened risk of severe impact from large-scale attacks.

The solutions often lack the capacity to mitigate massive attack volumes, leaving critical systems vulnerable. Proactive evaluation and reinforcement of DDoS defenses, are essential to safeguarding against such threats.