Last year, when Spamhaus was hit with a massive DDoS attack it set a record for the biggest DDoS attack in recorded history and while that was enough to cause the company a lot of troubles, it’s nothing compared to the latest strike.
Reported by DDoS defense firm CloudFlare, the attack peaked at 400Gbit/s, which is 33% bigger than the attack on Spamhaus. The only thing we don’t know is who was the target, as CloudFlare have stated that they do not have permission to disclose those details.
“Very big NTP reflection attack hitting us right now. Appears to be bigger than the #Spamhaus attack from last year” said CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince in a recent Tweet.
“Someone’s got a big, new cannon. Start of ugly things to come,” Prince tweeted. “These NTP reflection attacks are getting really nasty,” he added.
The new attack was what is known as a reflection attack, where a packet is sent with a forged source IP address, effectively attacks its self, as it tries to receive the packet and then replies to its self.
“The attacker sends a packet apparently from the intended victim to some server on the Internet that will reply immediately. Because the source IP address is forged, the remote Internet server replies and sends data to the victim.” said CloudFlare programmer John Graham-Cumming.
Maybe the target will be revealed in the coming weeks, or perhaps this is just the first run of a much larger attack, only time will tell.
Thank you Information Week for providing us with this information.
