DDoS attacks are a constant problem that any business could suffer. 

They are massive controlled traffic that is directed to a target (server) with the goal of taking it out of order.

Directly or indirectly, one day, you will be affected. They are getting more frequent, and we can easily expect around 10 million attacks this year. Here, we have 5 of the biggest DDoS attacks in recent years. Those who really hit strong and disrupted businesses. 

2021 Gambling company and DDoS ransom attack

This year’s entry focuses on a particular strategy some cybercriminals love – a ransom attack! The attack was complex and lasted months. When it became critical was in March 2021, when the traffic reached 800+ Gbps. Akamai was the company that was in charge of defending the gambling company. It reported that the problem was in a network protocol called Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP). It led to a volumetric attack that bypassed the typical TCP and UDP traffic defenses. Still, Akamai managed to handle it.

2020 AWS DDoS attack

Amazon Web Services are getting attack constantly. What is interesting about this case from February 2020 is that the traffic was massive. At its peak, it reached an astonishing volume of 2.3 Tbps! Of course, AWS could swiftly mitigate the danger and handle the situation, but it was still an impressive attempt to bring AWS down and got a record for the strongest DDoS attack yet. The vulnerability that the hackers used was a part of the CLDAP (Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). 

2019 Imperva SYN attack

During 2019, the company Imperva had two strong attacks to stop and save its clients. One was a DDoS SYN flood attack with 500 million packets per second (PPS) and the other with 580! It got the record for the largest application layer attack, so definitely a nasty attempt. The packets’ size was significant too. They range from 800 to 900 bytes each. 

2018 GitHub Memcached attack

The attack that brought down GitHub in 2018 was incredibly severe. The traffic was 1.35Tbps per second! Of course, GitHub protection was not strong enough, and after a while, it couldn’t respond anymore. The whole problem started thanks to the exploited communication port – 11211 UDP. The criminals use it to amplify the attack and send traffic, almost a hundred times the size of the original request. 

2017 Blizzard DDoS attack

The game company Blizzard also has its enemies. In 2017 their servers were under attack, and this time it was a very strong DDoS attack. Many gamers couldn’t connect to the servers and play some of their favorite games like World of Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, and more. It left them angry and without service for several hours. Since then, there have been more attacks, and Blizzard is still a big target. 

Suggested article: 5 Ways to Spot a Phishing Email

Conclusion

We are heaving a steady rise in the number of DDoS attacks. They also become more complex and stronger. We can see around a 10% increase each year, and we are already in the 10 million range. More news will come about new DDoS attacks, and new dark records will be made. It is inevitable. So, next time when you can’t send something through your messenger app or the email client does not work, it is probably another DDoS attack.