A week-long DDoS attack that launched a flood of traffic at an Asian e-commerce company in early November was the biggest such incident so far this year, according to Prolexic, a company that defends websites against such attacks. The distributed denial-of-service attack consisted of four consecutive waves launched from multiple botnets between Nov. 5 and Nov. 12, 2011.

The attack on the unnamed organisation and its DNS provider happened between 5 and 12 November and reached 45Gbit/s at peak, equivalent to 69 million packets or 15,000 connections per second, way above the level that can be easily stemmed using standalone appliances, the company claimed. This attack was three times larger in packets per second volume than the biggest attack Prolexic has mitigated previously, which also occurred in 2011.

Prolexic technicians identified a randomised attack consisting of the largest volume of GET, SYN, ICMP, UDP and DNS floods launched in a single attack campaign this year. They identified that the attack was coming from botnets in multiple worldwide locations.In addition, unlike typical DDoS attacks that are coordinated from one geographic source, this attack was coordinated globally.