Vulnerability Management, Threat Intelligence

Thwarted massive DDoS attack against US financial firm detailed

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Akamai has disclosed that it was able to avert a significant distributed denial-of-service attack against a major U.S. financial firm, reports The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Such a DDoS attack, which reached a peak of 633.7 GB of traffic per second and was less than two seconds long, could have substantially affected the organization's web systems had it not been thwarted, according to Akamai Senior Product Manager Craig Sparling. Aside from U.S. traffic volumes to the financial organization's website being more than two times its average during the time of the attack, malicious traffic was also observed to come from China, Russia, Ukraine, India, Bulgaria, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and Brazil. Attackers behind the DDoS intrusion also targeted the organization's main web landing page to compromise online banking. "Financial institutions are a key pillar of an economy, and targeting such businesses often has a larger impact on the overall economy," said researchers.

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