Blog

Security

How Akamai Defended an Indian Bank Against Record-Breaking DDoS Attacks

Prathmesh Verma is a Senior Security Architect Lead, Asia-Pacific, at the Akamai Security Operations Command Center.

On May 3, 2026, and May 13, 2026, one of India’s leading public sector banks faced sophisticated, multi-vector distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks designed to overwhelm both network bandwidth and perimeter infrastructure. Through extensive reconnaissance, the attackers identified a critical login endpoint used by multiple banking applications. A successful attack would have disrupted customer access, preventing users from logging in and using the applications.

At its peak, the May 3 attack reached 1.72 Tbps and nearly 23 million packets per second (Mpps) — enough traffic to saturate the bandwidth and compute resources of many perimeter defenses (Figure 1). It was the biggest DDoS attack in the bank’s history — until the one that struck on May 13.…