Massive DDoS attacks intensify

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Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are proliferating and their onslaught is more virulent than ever. Two mitigation companies specialized in protecting servers reported intense bombardment of data requests by bad actors whose tactics changed constantly. Monday, Imperva announced that it defended a Chinese telecom client against an offensive that lasted over four hours and peaked at more than 3.9 million requests per second (RPS). Attackers sent 25.3 billion requests to their target with an average rate of 1.8 million RPS. This attempt was launched by a botnet composed of hacked routers, security cameras and servers associated with 170,000 different IP addresses. The week before, Akamai said it had recently protected an Eastern European client against a record-setting rush of 704.8 million packets per second. DDoS attacks can be measured in one of several ways, namely in the number of packets or the number of requests issued per second. The current records are 809 million packets per second and 17.2 million RPS.

⇨ Ars Technica, Dan Goodin, “The record-setting DDoSes keep coming, with no end in sight.”

2022-09-21