Large-scale attacks designed to bring down Internet services by sending them more traffic than they can process continue to get bigger, with the largest so far measured at 7,3 terabits per second.
It was reported on Friday by Internet security and performance provider Cloudflare.
The 7,3 Tbps attack amounted to 37,4 terabytes of unwanted traffic hitting the target in just 45 seconds. That’s an almost incomprehensible amount of data, equivalent to more than 9.300 full-length HD movies or 7.500 hours of HD streaming content in less than a minute.
Cloudflare said the attackers bombarded an average of nearly 22.000 destination ports from a single IP address belonging to the target, who was only identified as a Cloudflare customer.
A total of 34.500 ports were hit, indicating the comprehensiveness and well-planned nature of the attack. Cloudflare said the new record DDoS exploited several reflection or amplification vectors, including the Network Time Protocol and Quote of the Day Protocol, which “listens” on UDP port 17 and responds with a short message, the Echo Protocol, which responds with the same data it receives, and Portmapper services used to determine the resources available to applications connecting via Remote Procedure Call.
Cloudflare said the attack was carried out through one or more Mirai-based botnets. Such botnets typically consist of compromised home and small office routers, web cameras, and other Internet of Things devices.
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