GitHub exceeded in 8 minutes the largest DDoS attack in history

The DDoS attack primarily consists of making excessive amounts of requests to a server until it “falls”;  A well-known website suffered this attack, and nobody noticed it. February 28, 2018, will become a day to remember in the history of computer security, as hackers have dared to produce the most massive attack DDoS, recorded so far.

 GitHub exceeded in 8 minutes the largest DDoS attack in history, GitHub exceeded in 8 minutes the largest DDoS attack in history, Optocrypto

GitHub exceeded in 8 minutes the largest DDoS attack in history

Attacks of this type had already been registered before this day, but not of this magnitude. In October 2016, users complained about having problems with popular platforms such as  Twitter, Reddit or Spotify.  These “problems” were the result of the most prominent attack DDos registered at that time, which was made to the company Dyn. That was caused by a giant botnet – a set of computer bots or bots, which control the infected servers remotely – that was able to saturate the servers with 1.35 Tbps (Terabits per second), causing them to fall.

On this occasion and to our surprise it was  Github -a site to host projects and applications that contain source code-, who faced a similar situation.

On February 28 at 6:15 in Madrid, users of this website. And we noticed that it was a bit slow and for a few minutes was inaccessible. However, no one suspected that a heated battle was being fought behind the scenes.

This attack, unlike that of the company Dyn, was not the result of using a botnet. But that was the result of 100,000 Memcached servers. That cache all types of data to optimize the speed of networks. And websites-belonging to different businesses and institutions.

Although the attack was nothing more and nothing less than 1.35 Tbps, the vice president of Akamai revealed that: “they model their capacity based on five times the biggest attack the Internet has ever seen,” according to Wired.

The truth is that we are happy that they have left well off this attack. However, this produces a new challenge for companies like Akamai and GitHub.

GitHub exceeded in 8 minutes the largest DDoS attack in history, GitHub exceeded in 8 minutes the largest DDoS attack in history, Optocrypto

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