Distributed Denial of Service [DDoS] assaults have become commonplace in recent years. A DDoS assault can impede your online services- email, websites, and anything else that connects to the internet- whether you are a small non-profit or a large international corporation.
Furthermore, DDoS attacks are sometimes employed to divert your cyber security activities while other illegal behavior occurs, such as data theft or network invasion.
FAMOUS DDoS ATTACKS
- THE ESTONIAN ATTACK IN APRIL 2007
On April 27, 2002, the Estonian DDoS attacks began. It targeted the parliament, ministries, banks, newspapers, and financial organizations, among other Estonian websites. In addition, individuals performing ping floods to botnets, which were utilized for spamming at the time, were all part of the attacks.
Countries are now studying the Estonian DDoS attacks as one of the earliest and most incredible cyber-warfare incidents ever. According to experts, the DDoS attack was launched in retaliation for a political dispute with Russia. As a result of this attack, NATO established the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia.
- DDoS ATTACKS ON SIX BANKS IN SEPTEMBER 2012
Customers from six major US banks were unable to access their accounts or pay bills online in September 2012. A series of +200 DDoS attacks launched against banks including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, and PNC.
Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters, a hacktivist organization, claimed responsibility and promised to continue DDoSing unless an anti-Islamic film was removed from YouTUbe.
- THE SPAMHAUS ATTACK IN MARCH 2013
Spamhaus, a non-profit anti-spam group, is responsible for filtering a massive amount of daily spam email communications directly (or indirectly). Unfortunately, the 2013 DDoS DNS reflection attack shut down their website and a chunk of their email services, even though they had previously been attacked and DDoSed and had some DDoS services in place.
A total of 30,956 open DNS resolvers were employed in the DDoS attack, which generated an estimated 300 Gbps of traffic. The attack was traced back to Cyberbunker, a Dutch corporate employee blocked by Spamhaus for spamming. For almost two weeks, Cyberbunker planned and executed the Distributed Denial of Service attack.
- DDoS ATTACKS AGAINST GITHUB IN 2015 AND 2017
This is one of the world’s most significant Distributed Denial of Service attacks, in which a tremendous inflow of traffic swamped the source-code management\web hosting platform at a rate 1.3TBps, delivering at a rate of 126.9 million per second.
Instead of utilizing botnets, the attacks used mem caching (a database caching system that improves website speed) to fake GitHub’s IP address and multiplied the requests submitted to the platform.
The attack lasted 10 minutes, during which the platform was down for 5 minutes. The platform could only stop with DDoS protection in this time frame.
Recovery took nearly a week. GitHub was likewise the target of a politically motivated attack.
- AWS ATTACK IN FEBRUARY 2020
AWS stated In February 2020 that it had successfully mitigated a major DDoS attack aimed at an unnamed AWS customer. The attack lasted three days and reached a peak bandwidth of 2.3Tbps. As a result, the DDoS attack on AWS was rapidly mitigated and caused little harm.
Even yet, the sheer volume of traffic directed at a customer of the world’s largest cloud computing company had cybersecurity specialists jump out of their seats.
The attacker utilized a Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP) Reflection DDoS assault. CLDAP is based on UDP, an older protocol than TCP-based LDAP.
The attackers scanned for and found a massive number of third-party CLDAP servers that were vulnerable. These servers can respond to requests with an amplification factor ranging from 56x to 1000x.
- LARGEST DDoS ATTACKS OF ALL TIME
In September 2017, a state-sponsored hacking organization launched the largest DDoS attack ever against Google, according to Google. The event, which entailed flooding Google’s internet network with traffic, was revealed by Google’s cloud division on Friday.
The Distributed Denial of Service onslaught lasted six months, with bandwidth reaching 2.5Tbps at its height.
The figure surpasses the 2.3Tbps DDoS attack on Amazon’s cloud firm AWS in February, previously regarded as the world’s most significant Distributed Denial of Service attack.
According to Google’s security team, the 2.5Tbps DDoS against google was traced back to a government-backed outfit that used four Chinese internet service providers to launch the deluge of traffic.
Despite the 2.5Tbps attack, which targeted thousands of Google servers at the same time in 2017, “the attack had no impact,” according to firm security engineer Damian Menschen.
Lastly, don’t become the next person on this list to fall prey to an ongoing DDoS attack. Consider how difficult it would be to end it if no security was in place. Start your DDoS mitigation strategy now.