Prolexic Stops Largest DDoS Attack In History
If there's one thing you don't want happening to your cheap hosting provider, it has to be a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack can cause downtime, leading to customers jumping ship, as well as bringing malicious traffic to your website. Good thing there are companies out there, watching for these attacks in order to stop them in their tracks!
Prolexic, a leader in the world of DDoS protection, has announced it successfully stopped the biggest DNS reflection attack in its 10-year history. How big? The attack that took place on May 27 peaked at 167 Gbps, aimed at crippling a real-time financial exchange platform.
Prolexic Saves The Day
This time, the DDoS mitigation for the attack was distributed across the company's four scrubbing centers (Hong Kong, London, San Jose, and Ashburn, Virginia), all cloud-based, with the London center taking the brunt of the malicious traffic.
What Is A DNS Reflection DDoS?
This type of DDoS attack takes advantage of different security weaknesses in DNS protocol. The attacker makes a lot of spoofed queries to a variety of public DNS servers. At this point, the source IP address is forged to look as if it is actually the target in the attack. The DNS server gets the fake request and replies, with the reply directed to the spoofed source address, the reflection component.
The targeted server receives replies from every DNS server used, which makes it almost impossible to identify the source. If the spoofed queries produce larger responses, the attack is amplified.
This Attack
In the detected attack, Prolexic conducted digital forensics which revealed that 92 percent of the machines taking part in the attack were open DNS resolvers all sourcing from port 53, representing a “malformed DNS response.”
The company issued a white paper in March of this year regarding DNS reflection attacks, stating that their use is on the rise and demonstrating how DNS protocol can be exploited by attackers. Their Q1 Global DDoS Attack Report also highlighted an in-depth case study about these types of attacks.
What Can You Do?
A recommendation from Prolexic: validate your DDoS mitigation service to minimize downtime with your cheap hosting with domain provider. Do this before an incident occurs to save yourself from an attack. This will save you from downtime due to your hosting provider's sub-par protection.
No matter if you think DDoS won't occur at all or your provider's protection solution is all you'll need to stop attacks, you need to validate this. Otherwise, an attack will occur and your site will be in the dark.
Do you worry about the threat of DDoS attack? Do you know if your hosting provider's protection can handle it?
