MANILA, Philippines – In terms of large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, another more recent DDoS attack has eclipsed the 1.35 terabits per second (Tbps) attack against coding platform GitHub.

Earlier this week, DDoS mitigation service Arbor Networks reported a 1.7 Tbps DDoS attack that took advantage of the same tactic as the GitHub attack. The attack was meant to hit a US-based service provider.

Carlos Morales, vice president of global sales engineering and operations at Arbor Networks, said: “The attack was based on the same memcached reflection/amplification attack vector that made up the GitHub attack. It’s a testament to the defense capabilities that this service provider had in place to defend against an attack of this nature that no outages were reported because of this.” 

Ars Technica, meanwhile, reported that attacks of this magnitude may now also be accompanied by a ransom demand – pay the attacker to stop the DDoS attack or it will continue unabated. Some DDoS attacks now include a message to pay a cryptocurrency ransom along with an address to a wallet, presumably to silence the attack that’s been sent out.

As Morales added in his report, “we should expect terabit attacks to continue,” so sites and services may want to invest in DDoS mitigation services as a matter of course. – Rappler.com