(Credit: John Lund via Getty Images)
A new DDoS attack was so massive it packed double the firepower of the previous record-holder.
On Monday, internet infrastructure company Cloudflare reported a distributed denial-of-service attack that lasted over 40 seconds but peaked at a whopping 22.2Tbps while pushing 10.6 billion packets per second
According to Cloudflare, the attack was “twice as large as anything seen on the internet before,” featuring double the intensity of an 11.5Tbps DDoS that the company detected and blocked earlier this month.
The goal of such attacks is to take a website, mobile app, or internet service offline by overwhelming the target with a flood of internet traffic. Cloudflare, which provides DDoS protection services, said it autonomously “detected and mitigated” the assault, suggesting it had little impact.
The company has traced the incident to the “Aisuri” botnet, a collection of infected internet-connected computers. This particular DDoS came from over 404,000 unique IP addresses, which suggests hundreds of thousands of compromised devices or abused servers were involved in generating attack traffic. The aim was to hit a single IP address belonging to “a European network infrastructure company.”
“Based on internal analysis using a proprietary system, the source IPs were not spoofed,” Cloudflare added.
DDoS attacks exceeding 1Tbps used to be rare. But Cloudflare says it's increasingly been facing "hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks" that can exceed such attack intensity. This recently included blocking over 6,500 hyper-volumetric attacks in Q2.
According to XLab, a cybersecurity unit within the Chinese company QAX, the Aisuri botnet also appears to be responsible for the earlier 11.5Tbps attack on Cloudflare. XLab reports that Aisuri now spans 300,000 infected devices, mainly IoT products such as vulnerable internet routers. To compromise some of the devices, the creators of the botnet initially breached an update server for a router manufacturer called Totolink to distribute malware.
“Members of the Aisuru group act flamboyantly and often launch highly destructive attacks on ISPs (internet service providers) under the pretext of 'for fun,'” XLab added, noting Aisuru’s rivals have been leaking details about the group on social media.
Although Cloudflare was able to block the 22.2 Tbps attack, Aisuru could pose a serious threat to other internet services without major DDoS protection.
Security journalist Brian Krebs has also reported that the creators of Aisuru have been selling access to the botnet and its DDoS-attack capabilities on Telegram. "At some level, these sizes of (DDoS) attacks are just stupid demos/bragging rights, because there aren't many networks that will forward or accept anywhere near that much traffic all at once," Krebs wrote on Tuesday.