Anonymous Sudan Takedown: Akamai's Role
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) recently announced the takedown of Anonymous Sudan, a prolific entity in the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) space who are known especially for their politically motivated hacktivism. This takedown is a huge step toward making the internet a safer place, and it required significant effort from multiple parties, including Akamai.
In light of the acknowledgment of our support and assistance, we wanted to take a moment to talk about Anonymous Sudan and the endeavors put forth by Akamai related to this takedown.
Akamai’s defense against Anonymous Sudan
Before the hacktivism branding exercise, the group now known as Anonymous Sudan had been active for at least a year in the DDoS-for-hire space. This group gained major notoriety shortly after participating in high-visibility, politically driven DDoS campaigns. Akamai has defended multiple customers from Anonymous Sudan–facilitated attacks, either as a direct result of Anonymous Sudan orchestration or as a result of someone purchasing their DDoS-for-hire service offerings.
Anonymous Sudan primarily drove attack traffic from fleets of fraudulently obtained virtual private servers from various providers across the industry, including Linode. While hunting and attempting to rout out Anonymous Sudan from Linode networks, patterns were uncovered that helped identify their operations and associated infrastructure internally.
These proactive monitoring operations allowed fast turnarounds from identification to investigation — and, ultimately, the destruction of supporting attack driver fleet infrastructure. To date, thousands of instances of virtualized attack driver fleet systems have been identified, investigated, and destroyed by the Akamai Trust & Safety team.
Thanks are in order
DDoS is a difficult and pervasive problem that no single organization can solve alone. Akamai will continue to collaborate across the industry, with private and public sector partners, to help better protect our customers, and make the internet a better place not only for them, but for everyone.
Akamai would like to thank the members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the DOJ, and the Big Pipes working group for their commitment to prioritizing DDoS investigations, as well as their investment of time and energy into unraveling these operations and attempting to disrupt them.