Another Record-Breaking DDoS Attack Signals Shift in Criminal Methods

Another Record-Breaking DDoS Attack Signals Shift in Criminal Methods
Malicious botnet sources explode in new attacks that push boundaries in terms of volume and duration.

The past month has seen a spate of record-breaking and intensely long distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks leveled at hosting providers and enterprises, suggesting a shift in tooling and botnet sourcing among the most advanced professional threat actors. 


The latest attack was revealed by researchers at Akamai, who today reported another high-water mark. On June 21 its team mitigated the largest-ever packet-per-second DDoS attack that they'd ever recorded on their platform, one that was double the volume of the previous packets-per-second peak.  


At its height, the attack sought to overwhelm its target, a large European bank, with 809 million packets per second. The attack ramped up very quickly, moving from normal traffic patterns to its peak volume within two minutes and lasting just under 10 minutes. Packet-based DDoS attacks work on the same general principle as more common bits-per-second attacks, as both try to overwhelm the target company's infrastructure, just in slightly different ways. Whereas bits-per-second volumetric attacks try to overload the inbound pipeline, packets-per-second volumetric attacks work to exhaust internal network resources. 


"One way to think about the difference in DDoS attack types is to imagine a grocery store checkout. A high-bandwidth attack, measured in bps, is like a thousand people showing up in line, each one with a full cart ready to check out," explains Tom Emmons in a blog post today. "However, a PPS-based attack is more like a million people showing up, each to buy a pack of gum. In both cases, the final result is a service or network that cannot handle the traffic thrown at it."


According to his colleague Roger Barra ..

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