#CyberSecurityPulse: Biggest-Ever DDoS Attack Hits Github Website
March 5, 2018
At the end of 2016, a DDoS attack on DynDNS blocked major Internet sites such as Twitter, Spotify and PayPal. The Mirai botnet was used to take advantage of the full bandwidth of thousands of Internet-connected devices. However, last Wednesday 28th of February we witnessed the largest DDoS attack ever seen on the GitHub website, reaching a record 1.35 Tbps and 126.9 million packets per second.
Interestingly, the attackers did not use any botnets, but miscondivd Memcached servers to amplify the attack. Memcached operation is based on a distributed hash table. To prevent misuse of Memcached servers, administrators should consider firewalling, blocking or rate-limiting UDP on source port 11211 or completely disable UDP support if not in use. In this sense, Akamai estimates that at least 50,000 servers are vulnerable.
In fact, Arbor has confirmed this week a new attack with similar characteristics to the one perpetrated against Github, reaching 1.7 Terabits, 0.4 higher than last week. Although it has not communicated the name of the protected client, the company has indicated that it is a corporation based in the United States, which would have suffered from the same amplification vector of previous days relying on servers of the memcached type.
More information at GitHub
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