The largest distributed denial of service attack was recorded Wednesday and targeted GitHub. The DDoS attack measured 1.3 Tbps of sustained traffic for eight minutes. That shattered a previous DDoS publicly record attack associated with the Mirai botnet in Sept., 2016 that maxed-out at half the intensity (620 Gbps).
Wednesday’s attack is attributed to a form of DDoS attack called a memcached amplification technique.
In the case of memcached amplification attacks, adversaries are able to send a small byte-sized UDP-based packet request to a memcached server. The packets are spoofed to appear as if they were sent from the intended target of the DDoS attack. In response, the memcached server responds by sending the spoofed target a massively disproportionate response.
