Amazon said it mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever

Amazon said it mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever registered, bringing to an end a 2.3 Tbps attack in mid-February this year.

The incident was revealed in the company’s AWS Shield Threat Landscape, a report specifying web attacks alleviated by Amazon’s AWS Shield protection service.

The report didn’t recognize the beset AWS client but said the attack was launched using stolen CLDAP (Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) web servers and triggered three days of “elevated threat” for its AWS Shield staff.

A substitute for the older LDAP protocol, CLDAP is used to link, search, and adapt Internet-shared directories.

Exploited for DDoS attacks since late 2016, the CLDAP servers are known to intensify DDoS traffic by 56 to 70 times its original size, making it a highly desirable protocol.

The earlier record for the largest DDoS attack ever logged was of 1.7 Tbps, alleviated by NETSCOUT Arbor in March 2018.

Prior to that, the major DDoS attack ever chronicled was a 1.3 Tbps DDoS attack that hit GitHub, a month before, in February 2018.

Huge DDoS attacks have become rare, mainly due to internet service providers (ISPs), content delivery networks (CDNs), and other key internet players working together to protect susceptible Memcached systems.

Today, most DDoS attacks typically peak in the 500 Gbps range, which is why news of the AWS 2.3 Tbps attack was an amazement for industry players.

For instance, in its quarterly report for Q1 2020, DDoS mitigation service Link11 stated that the largest DDoS attack it alleviated was 406 Gbps. Cloudflare said the biggest DDoS attack it alleviated topped at over 550 Gbps.

Akamai likewise stated earlier today of extenuating a DDoS attack of 1.44 Tbps in the first week of June 2020.

Nevertheless, these statistics are rarities and the outliers in every DDoS quarterly report. Most DDoS attacks are small in scale.