As we reported last week code repository, GitHub was hit with the largest DDoS attack ever recorded on Wednesday. The directed denial of service only incapacitated the site for around nine minutes, but the strike pummeled servers with data volumes reaching almost 2Tbps.
Initially, GitHub reported the attack peaking at 1.3 Tbps, but this week DDoS mitigation service Netscout Arbor confirmed that the peak was closer to 1.7Tbps — 2.5 times bigger than the previous record. These volumes were achieved using a reflection/amplification vector that exploits memcached servers to amplify the attacker’s sent data by a factor of 51,000.