French hosting company OVH has been subject to the biggest DDoS attack known to date, with peaks of over 1 Tbps of traffic.
Over the past week, the company has been subjected to an attack greater than the one suffered by KrebsonSecurity. Google is now providing free DDoS mitigation services to KrebsonSecurity, backing up the website after Akamai withdrew expensive pro bono support.
“Last days, we got lot of huge DDoS. Here, the list of ‘bigger than 100Gbps’ only. You can see the simultaneous DDoS are close to 1Tbps!” Octava Klaba, founder and CTO of OVH, tweeted after the attack, “This botnet with 145607 cameras/dvr (1-30Mbps per IP) is able to send >1.5Tbps DDoS. Type: tcp/ack, tcp/ack+psh, tcp/syn.”
Klaba said that the attack had used IoT devices to mount the attack including hacked CCTV cameras and personal video recorders.
A DDoS attack stands for Distributed Denial of Service attack. It is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. They target a wide variety of important resources, from banks to news websites, and present a major challenge to making sure people can publish and access important information.
Research suggests that one-thirds of all downtime incidents are attributed to DDoS attacks and more than 2000 daily DDoS Attacks are observed world-wide by Arbor Networks. According to TrendMicro Research, $150 USD can buy a week-long DDoS attack on the black market.
