Yandex Thwarts the Largest Known DDoS Attack: 21.8M Requests Per Second

The Russian tech giant Yandex announced this week that in August and September it was the victim of the internet's largest-ever recorded distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attack, according to Reuters. This is an attack in which hackers try to flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic in order to paralyze it.

The attack began in August and reached a record level on September 5. However, Yandex successfully defended against even that largest barrage. 

"Our experts did manage to repel a record attack of nearly 22 million requests per second,” the company said in a statement. “This is the biggest known attack in the history of the internet.”

Back in 2016, a DDoS attack stopped Internet traffic company Dyn DNS and other major websites like Twitter and Amazon were still for two hours after an earlier DDoS attack.

The question during these attacks remains as to whether companies should pay up to deal with them. A survey conducted on security reported that IT teams noted a 60 percent increase in cyberattacks on their organizations throughout 2021. 

The financial impact of these attacks has also dramatically affected companies. Verizon reported that the average cost of a breach in data has risen to $21,659 per incident over the course of 2020. Generally, each incident could cost between $800 to $650,000 and successful cyberattacks can even catastrophically increase this cost, with some costing over $1 million or even more.

As an enterprise, being aware of the dangers of ransomware and other cybersecurity attacks is essential to the healthy functioning of a company. What separates regular businesses from those that are resilient to these attacks is one thing — being able to ensure business continuity by having plans and the ability to execute these when needed. The best companies have a plan in place that would not only address a security problem when it happens but will also prevent it from happening in the first place.