US service provider survives the biggest recorded DDoS in history

(credit: California Department of Water Resources)

A new technique that abuses poorly secured servers is fueling record-breaking denial-of-service attacks, along with notes demanding the targets pay hefty ransoms for the debilitating flood of junk traffic to stop.

As Ars reported last week, memcached, a database caching system for speeding up websites and networks, lets DDoS vandals amplify their attacks by an unprecedented factor of 51,000. That means a single home computer with a 100 megabit-per-second upload capacity from its ISP is capable of bombarding a target with a once-unimaginable 5 terabits per second of traffic, at least in theory.

Following the discovery that DDoS vandals in the wild were abusing open memcached servers, researchers last week predicted a new round of record attacks. Two days later, DDoS mitigation service Akamai/Prolexic reported the 1.3Tbps attack against Github, just slightly topping previous records set in 2016.

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