Cyber Defense eMagazine December Edition for 2021

Surviving The New Era of Terabit-Class DDoS Attacks
By Richard Hummel, Threat Intelligence Lead, NETSCOUTy
In March 2018, a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) disrupted service for the developer
platform GitHub. The attack, which lasted for approximately 20 minutes, was the largest on record.
It was also a milestone. At roughly 1.2 terabits for second, it formally inaugurated the era of terabit-class
attacks, roughly the equivalent of 25 or 30 high definition movies every second. It was followed one week
later by another attack, a 1.7 Tbps assault at a U.S.-based service provider.
DDoS attacks flood targeted networks with requests for traffic that overwhelm the system and cause
outages. Attackers had been, for years, setting new records in the volume of traffic they could send. Still,
in the years leading up to the attack, there were some that debated whether an attack of that size was
even feasible given certain technical limitations.
Now, just three years later, terabit-class attacks occur nearly every month. Recently, a major international
enterprise software provider said that it had mitigated a 2.4 Tbps attack.
The good news is that organizations with up-to-date DDoS defenses and sufficient mitigation capacity
can maintain availability in the face of these extremely large attacks. But, that doesn’t mean enterprises
can ignore the risk of massive DDoS attacks. Cybercriminals continue to innovate in this field by
combining volumetric DDoS attacks with other threats, such as ransomware; or by deploying multi-vector
attacks that drastically increase complexity for defenders.
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