The biggest DDoS attack of all time
Without really knowing it, the whole world just went through a DDoS attack as we’ve never seen before. Hackers have tried to take down tens of millions of machines. But the most amazing thing is that they ended up using only a very small number of devices to carry out their attacks.
Last week, the internet almost faltered. Hackers have carried out an impressive campaign of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, recently translated by the French Language Enrichment Commission as “collective attacks by saturation of service”.
Hackers have broken all records, and if the security giant Cloudflare managed to mitigate the attack, the company admits it has never seen such a threat. This is how the hackers sent via their machines 26 million HTTPS requests per second, breaking the previous “record” of 15.3 million. Still, only 5,067 devices were used for this major operation. This attack was mainly carried out via cloud service providers, showing that hackers have used large servers and virtual machines. Unlike a “classic” use of small connected devices, this method gives them unparalleled firepower.
Over 212 million HTTPS requests in 30 seconds, a record
The attack lasted less than 30 seconds but generated over 212 million HTTPS requests, all distributed in 121 countries. In passing, remember that DDoS attacks can be measured by several criteria: the number of requests sent per second (the case that concerns us here), the number of packets, or the amount of data passing through them. At the head of the concerned states, we find the USA, Brazil, and Russia.
And among the most affected suppliers, we find the French OVH, but also the Indonesian Telkomet or the North American boss. About 3% of the attacks went through the Tor network, which Dark Web users (but not only…) are familiar with. In comparison, Cloudfare followed another major attack that happened around the same time. Despite the 730,000 devices used (144 times more), this DDoS attack ultimately managed to generate only one million requests per second (23 times less).
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