Terabit DDoS attack era has arrived

A record 1.7 Tbps DDoS attack that ravaged the customer of a US-based service provider is more evidence that the “terabit attack era” has arrived, according to Arbor Networks.

Arbor Networks’ VP of Global Sales Engineering and Operations Carlos Morales said the attack, detected by the Arbor NETSCOUT’s ATLAS global traffic and DDoS threat monitoring system shattered the previous record of 650 Gbps recorded by ATLAS.

In a blog post, Morales revealed that the attack used the same reflection amplification technique as the 1.3 Tbps DDoS attack mounted against Github last week, as confirmed by Akamai.

A reflection amplification attack allows attackers to both magnify the amount of malicious traffic they generate and obfuscate the source of that traffic. It involves turning small requests into larger amplified responses.

The latest trend in such attacks is to use misconfigured memcached servers to launch high-volume User Datagram Protocol (UDP) reflection/amplification attacks.

Despite the massive scale of the attack, the service provider had defence capabilities in place that managed to ensure that no outages were reported, and such attacks are becoming increasingly common.

“While the internet community is coming together to shut down access to the many open mecached servers out there, the sheer number of servers running memcached openly will make this a lasting vulnerability that attackers will exploit,” Morales said.

“It is critically important for companies to take the necessary steps to protect themselves including implementation of best current practices.”

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