Web-based code hosting service GitHub experienced the most distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack ever recorded. According to one official report on the incident, On February 28th, the web traffic of 1.35 terabytes was posted on the website.
A DDoS protection provider, Aramaic, was able to overcome the attack. But warned that the attack was just the beginning. “It is highly likely that this record attack will not be the biggest for long,” Akamai said in a blog post. Mirai Botnet was used in the September 2016 attack, which is less than twice the size of GitHub attack. While, Memcache” server was used in the recent attack, thousands of vulnerable IoT devices used in the previous attack. A Memcache server is designed to speed up web applications and websites and to cache data. PCMag explains that, as it can amplify a packet of data traffic by up to 51,000 times, this technology can be exploited to conduct DDoS attacks.
Another DDoS protection provider, Cloudflare, explained:
“Launching such an attack is easy. First, the attacker implants a large payload on an exposed Memcached server. Then, the attacker spoofs the ‘get’ request message with target source IP.”
The stream of Internet traffic generated by such an attack will seize any website’s servers and disable them for a considerable time. Akamai reports that more than 50,000 incidents of such attacks be able to found across the globe which can be used to carry out such DDoS attacks. Last week there were such attacks, but by far the Gateshead attack is the biggest. In regulate to preclude any potential assaults of this nature, DDoS defense providers like Akamai and Cloudflare say urged Memcached server owners to firewall their servers or disable part of their functionalities.
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