Amazon said this Wednesday (17) that its AWS Shield service team, which offers protection against denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, managed to mitigate an attack that generated traffic of 2.3 Terabits per second (Tbps) in February of this year.
The name of the victim was not disclosed, nor was that of a possible perpetrator. This is the largest DDoS attack in history, surpassing one of 1.7 Tbps mitigated by NETSCOUT Arbor in March 2018. It was carried out using CLDAP (Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) servers under the command of the wrongdoers. This type of server is highly targeted, since it can amplify DDoS traffic by up to 70 times the initial size.
Attacks of this magnitude are rare. According to the protection service Link11, in the first quarter of 2020 the average size of DDoS attacks was 5 Gbps. Cloudflare, in turn, states that 92% of the DDoS attacks it managed to mitigate in the same period generated less than 10 Gbps of traffic, and 47% were even smaller, with less than 500 Mbps.
Source: ZDNet
