1.7 Tbps DDoS Attack – Hackers Breaks the Record Within 5 Days

Github Hits with a record-breaking DDoS attack last week, the attack peaked up to 1.35Tbps via 126.9 million packets per second.

Within 5 days of time, the record broken by using the same Memcached reflection/amplification attack vector that associated with the Github attack.

NETSCOUT Arbor confirms the record-breaking 1.7 Tbps DDoS Attack clocked by their ATLAS global traffic and DDoS threat data system against an unnamed U.S based target.

But the largest 1.7 Tbps DDoS attack doesn’t result in any downtime as the vendor having the defense in place for this high profile attack.

Memcached is a middleware so it lacks access controls and it should not be exposed to the public Internet, according to Shodan reports there are around 88,000 open Memcached servers found.

A carefully crafted technique allows an attacker with limited IP spoofing capacity (such as 1Gbps) to launch very large attacks (reaching 100s Gbps) “amplifying” the attacker’s bandwidth.

“While the internet community is coming together to shut down access to the many open Memcached servers out there, the sheer number of servers running Memcached openly will make this a lasting vulnerability that attackers will exploit,” says Arbor.

Security researchers recommended disabling the UDP support if it is not in use and to place the Memcached servers behind the Firewall. Also, it is recommended to specify Memcached servers to listen only on localhost.