The rise of DDoS and the proliferation of booter and stresser tools. Where once sophisticated DDoS attacks required sophisticated skills, these attacks can now be done by or at the behest of people with low to no hacking ability. There are more players in the game now with better tools at their disposal.
The Three Worst DDoS Attacks Ever Witnessed
While the IoT was introduced as a digital blessing, its introduction has also widened the attack surface for hackers, giving attackers a large number of entry points to target a business.
- OVH Attack 2016:
OVH is a France-based hosting provider that fell victim to a record-breaking DDoS attack measured at over one terabit per second (1 Tbps).
On September 21, the founder and CTO of OVH, Octave Klaba, revealed on Twitter that his company was hit with two simultaneous DDoS attacks, whose combined bandwidth reached almost 1 Tbps. Klaba tweeted, “We got lot of huge DDoS. Here, the list of “bigger that 100Gbps” only. You can see the simultaneous DDoS are close to 1 Tbps!”
Last days, we got lot of huge DDoS. Here, the list of “bigger that 100Gbps” only. You can see the
simultaneous DDoS are close to 1Tbps ! pic.twitter.com/XmlwAU9JZ6— Octave Klaba / Oles (@olesovhcom) September 22, 2016
A screen shot in his tweet showed multiple DDoS attacks that exceed 100 Gbps, including the one that peaked at 799 Gbps alone, making it the largest DDoS attack ever recorded.
- GitHub 2015
GitHub was targeted by one the biggest DDoS attacks for six days in March 2015. A blog post by GitHub, which was published on 27 March, said the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was the largest in github.com’s history.
GitHub said, the attack “involves a wide combination of attack vectors,” which “includes every vector we’ve seen in previous attacks as well as some sophisticated new techniques that use the web browsers of unsuspecting, uninvolved people to flood github.com with high levels of traffic.”
“Based on reports we’ve received, we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content,” GitHub says.
- BBC 2015
On New Year 2015, BBC was hit by a massive DDoS attack, which is now considered one of the biggest attacks by the New World Hacking group. BBC’s entire domain, including its on-demand television and radio player service were down for three hours and continued to have issues for the remainder of the day. The hacking group said that the attack on BBC reached 602Gbps. If accurate, that would put it at almost twice the size of the previous record of 334Gbps, reported by Arbor Networks last year.
According to a survey by Kaspersky Lab, 40% of businesses are still unclear about how to protect their business, brand and online presence against DDoS attacks. It’s quite hard to completely protect your online presence in this day and age, but it’s certainly not impossible. DDoS protection must be at the core of every cyber security strategy.
Anas Baig is a guest blogger, all opinions are his own.
