Tom Emmons is a data enthusiast who leads a team focused on machine learning and automation at Akamai. His areas of security expertise are in DDoS and application security. In terms of the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) landscape, 2020 was almost boring prior to the beginning of August. The excitement from the record peak Gbps and Mpps seen in early summer had worn off, and we weren't seeing a ton of interesting attacks \n Things changed abruptly early in the month, as a wave of ransom letters and associated attacks targeted businesses across a number of industries, claiming to be from well-known groups with names like "Fancy Bear" and the "Armada Collective." The largest of these attacks sent over 200 Gbps of traffic at their targets. \n The Akamai Security Intelligence Research Team (SIRT) published an advisory covering the initial findings on the  attacks on August 17, 2020 .…