Amazon Web Services Fights Off Massive DDoS Attack

Amazon’s Shield protection service says that it successfully defended itself against the biggest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack ever recorded. Amazon said its AWS Shield service mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, stopping a 2.3 Tbps attack in mid-February this year. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are designed to knock a website offline by flooding it with huge amounts of requests until it crashes. 

In a formal report about its DDoS protection service, AWS Shield, the company said the peak of the attack had been 44% larger than anything the service had seen before and resulted in a three-days of "elevated threat" status. Amazon did not identify what website or online service had been targeted by the attack. 

A DDoS attack is when a cyber attacker floods a website with bot traffic so it is overloaded and has to be taken offline.
According to a regular report from Amazon’s AWS Shield division, which is specifically designed to safeguard Amazon cloud customers against DDoS attacks, the effort topped out at 2.3 terabits per second. AWS Shield, the security service that protects applications running on AWS cloud from DDoS attacks, blocked a 2.3TB per second (Tbps) attack in February. According to the BBC, the previous record, set in 2018, was 1.7Tbps.

Details of the attack were published in AWS’s Q1 Threat Report, which said that the attack was “approximately 44% larger than any network volumetric event previously detected on AWS.” It caused 3 days of elevated threat.

DDoS Attacks Surge As A Consequence Of Covid-19
Technology company Neustar has warned of a dramatic rise in DDoS attacks during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the company mitigating more than twice the number of attacks as in first quarter 2019. Non-profit organisations have also been particularly affected.

According to Cloudflare, DDoS attacks against US anti-racism advocacy groups increased 1,120-fold between 26 May and 01 June compared with the last week in April.

As news of AWS’s record breaking DDoS attack emerges, global content delivery network Akami also reported a significant attack. During the first week of June 2020, it mitigated an attack against an internet hosting provider, the largest the company has seen at 1.44Tbps

According to Cloudflare, 92 percent of the DDoS attacks mitigated by the service in the first quarter of 2020 were under 10 Gbps and another 47 percent were evens smaller – under 550 megabits per second.

The previous record for the largest DDoS attack ever recorded was of 1.7 Tbps, mitigated by NETSCOUT Arbor in March 2018 and prior to that, the biggest DDoS attack ever recorded was a 1.3Tbps DDoS attack that hit GitHub, a month before, in February 2018.

Amazon Web Services:       Brinkwire:       Verdict:         ZDNet:          BBC: 

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