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. On June 21, 2020, Akamai mitigated the largest packet per second (PPS) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever recorded on the Akamai platform. The attack generated 809 million packets per second (Mpps), targeting a large European bank. We believe this is a new industry record for PPS-focused attacks, and well over double the size of the previous high-water mark on the Akamai platform, just one week after Akamai announced another massive DDoS attack . Looking holistically at DDoS activity since the onset of 2020, it is clear that large, sophisticated DDoS attacks are still a significant attack vector, and as we'll show later in this article, a concern for companies across many industry verticals. \r\n A new attack method \r\n DDoS attacks are almost always volumetric in nature, and generally measured in bits per second (bps).…