GitHub survives world's largest DDoS attack
- Category: DDoS攻擊
- Author: Admin
- Publisher:
Psychz Networks
- March 06,2018
One of world's most popular software development platform GitHub was recently hit by the largest DDoS(Dedicated Denial of Service) attacks ever recorded. The most commendable part was that GitHub was able to mitigate the attack under ten minutes and did not suffer any noteworthy loss. According to GitHub, it was a volumetric attack that persistently sent huge amounts of data to the website.
Timeline and intensity of attack
According to a blog post published by the GitHub team on 1st of March 2018, the attack took place precisely on February 28, 2018, between 17:21 to 17:30 UTC. GitHub was able to identify and mitigate the attack within the above mentioned time frame. GitHub also assured the users that the integrity and security of the data was preserved during the attack. The DDoS attack is said to have peaked at 1.35 Tbps which is the highest ever recorded. The number of packets incident on the website was estimated to 126.9 million packets per second. Most of the attack was mitigated within a matter of ten minutes. However, there was a spike of 400 Gbps after 18:00 UTC.
Type of the DDoS attack
In the past, we have seen huge DDoS attacks such as the Mirai attack which attacks the target through an army of bots called botnet. The bots could be any IOT device infested with the malware.
However, the type of attack on GitHub was completely different from the Mirai attack. Instead of using the botnet as the form of attack it used Memcached servers from all over the globe to concentrate the attack on GitHub. The Memcached servers are used to cache data to speed up websites and networks. However, these Memcached servers were used as a source to send huge amounts of data through the UDP port. The servers can interpret it as genuine UDP requests coming from various servers. The main source of the attacks were the Memcached servers in Europe and North America.
The attack was perpetrated by sending millions of request to Memcached servers all over the world. However, due to IP spoofing the Memcached servers are tricked into sending the response messages to the target server.
According to GitHub, the amplification factor of the attack was around 51,000 which meant that for every unit of data sent by the attacker 51000 units of data was sent to the target.
The Psychz Approach
For past few years, the hackers and attacker are finding new methods to cause damage and nuisance and we have been pretty much keeping ourselves abreast of dealing such malicious activities. Our network is designed to handle such attacks gracefully without letting it harm our customers.
This is done by keeping ourselves informed of the type and intensity of attacks occurring over the world like the one mentioned above. As the intensity of attack increases so does our DDoS protection system.Your data undergo multiple levels of filtering with the help of scrubbing centers where it is analyzed and dealt with.
We can see the attack on GitHub as a wake-up call. In the future, the intensity of the attack is suspected to increase even further. Hence, we ought to be ready for such attacks.
