Microsoft fends off record-breaking 3.47Tbps DDoS attack

Enlarge / Drowning in a sea of data. (credit: Getty Images)

As Internet attacks go, data floods designed to knock servers offline are among the crudest, akin to a brutish caveman wielding a club to clobber his rival. Over the years, those clubs have grown ever larger. New data provided by Microsoft on Thursday shows there's no end in sight to that growth.

The company's Azure DDoS Protection team said that in November, it fended off what industry experts say is likely the biggest distributed denial-of-service attack ever: a torrent of junk data with a throughput of 3.47 terabits per second. The record DDoS came from more than 10,000 sources located in at least 10 countries around the world.

DDoS arms race

The DDoS targeted an unidentified Azure customer in Asia and lasted for about two minutes.

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