Even a company as technologically sophisticated as Microsoft has to hustle sometimes to protect itself from hackers—now more so than ever:
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.
Stop, rewind, play it again:
[A] torrent of junk data with a throughput of 3.47 terabits per second.
Ummm...
Just to illustrate what a massive amount of data that is: Current estimates put the average global Internet upload speed on fixed broadband at about 25 megabits per second. A terabit is one million megabits. You do the math.
Those aren't the only whopper attacks Microsoft has been dealing with:
The following month, Microsoft said, Azure warded off two other monster DDoSes. Weighing in at 3.25Tbps, the first one came in four bursts and lasted about 15 minutes.
The second December DDoS reached a peak of 2.54Tbps and lasted about five minutes.
My goodness.
It makes you think...Where is it coming from? What's out there doing this?
