Biggest DDoS attack in history: 620Gbps
Last week KrebsOnSecurity was the target of the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever seen by Akamai.
KrebsOnSecurity is a leading cybersecurity publication, which recently provided in-depth details about an underground DDoS-for-hire service.
Not long after the DDoS report, the website faced a very large 620Gbps DDoS attack. The attack was mitigated by Akamai, which provides KrebsOnSecurity with protection against these attacks.
“Martin McKeay, Akamai’s senior security advocate, said the largest attack the company had seen previously clocked in earlier this year at 363Gbps,” said the website’s founder, Brian Krebs.
There was, however, a major difference between the KrebsOnSecurity DDoS and the previous record holder.
The 363Gpbs attack is thought to have been generated by a botnet of compromised systems using well-known techniques allowing them to “amplify” a relatively small attack into a much larger one.
“In contrast, the huge 620Gbps assault this week on my site appears to have been launched almost exclusively by a very large botnet of hacked devices,” Krebs said.
Because of the large size and duration of the huge DDoS attack on KrebsOnSecurity, Akamai kicked the website off its network. This immediately took the news site offline.
“I can’t really fault Akamai for their decision. I likely cost them a ton of money today. They were also providing me service pro bono. So, as I said, I don’t fault them at all,” Krebbs said on Twitter.
Some good news is that KrebsOnSecurity is back online thanks to Google Project Shield.
“I am happy to report that the site is back up — this time under Project Shield, a free program run by Google to help protect journalists from online censorship,” said Krebbs.
More on DDoS attacks
Biggest DDoS attack in Q1 2016 was 289Gbps
Google’s Project Shield: protecting news sites against DDoS attacks
Massive increase in DDoS attacks
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