Massive DDoS attack discovered, mitigated

Threat actors have launched a distributed denial-of-service attack peaking at 1.5 billion packets per second against an unnamed European DDoS mitigation service provider, which was averted by UK DDoS attack detection and mitigation firm FastNetMon, BleepingComputer reports.

Hacked customer-premises equipment, including MiktoTik routers and other IoT devices, from over 11,000 networks around the world accounted for most of the illicit traffic involved in the intrusion, which is among the largest packet-rate floods yet, findings from FastNetMon showed.

FastNetMon leveraged the impacted organization's DDoS scrubbing facility to thwart the intrusion in real-time. Such an incident comes after Cloudflare disclosed neutralizing the largest volumetric DDoS intrusion yet, which reached up to 11.5 terabits per second.

"Without proactive ISP-level filtering, compromised consumer hardware can be weaponised at a massive scale. The industry must act to implement detection logic at the ISP level to stop outgoing attacks before they scale," said FastNetMon founder Pavel Odintsov.