One Year of DDoS Attacks Against a Cloud Provider: an Overview

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of DDoS attacks against a European cloud provider in 2021, highlighting the evolving complexity and the ongoing challenges in detection and mitigation.

Contribution

It offers an empirical analysis of one year's worth of DDoS attack data, illustrating attack patterns and industry challenges in combating volumetric threats.

Findings

Increased attack complexity over time

Persistent challenge in detection and mitigation

Significant impact on cloud infrastructure stability

Abstract

Distributed denial of service attacks represents one of the most important threats to cloud-providers. Over the years, volumetric DDoS attacks have become increasingly important and complex. Due to the rapid adaptation of attackers to the detection and mitigation methods designed to counter them, the industry needs to constantly monitor and analyse the attacks they face. In this paper, we present an overview of the attacks that were perpetrated against our infrastructure in 2021. Our motivation is to give an insight of the challenge that DDoS attacks still represent within a large European cloud provider