Last week KrebsOnSecurity was the target of the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever seen by Akamai.<\/p>\n
KrebsOnSecurity<\/strong><\/a> is a leading cybersecurity publication, which recently provided in-depth details about an underground DDoS-for-hire service<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cMartin McKeay, Akamai\u2019s senior security advocate, said the largest attack the company had seen previously clocked in earlier this year at 363Gbps,\u201d said the website\u2019s founder<\/strong><\/a>, Brian Krebs.<\/p>\n There was, however, a major difference between the KrebsOnSecurity DDoS and the previous record holder.<\/p>\n The 363Gpbs attack is thought to have been generated by a botnet of compromised systems using well-known techniques allowing them to \u201camplify\u201d a relatively small attack into a much larger one.<\/p>\n \u201cIn 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,\u201d Krebs said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d Krebbs said on Twitter<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Some good news is that KrebsOnSecurity is back online thanks to\u00a0Google Project Shield.<\/p>\n \u201cI am happy to report that the site is back up \u2014 this time under Project Shield, a free program run by Google to help protect journalists from online censorship,\u201d said Krebbs.<\/p>\n Biggest DDoS attack in Q1 2016 was 289Gbps<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Google\u2019s Project Shield: protecting news sites against DDoS attacks<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\nMore on DDoS attacks<\/h3>\n