Largest DDoS attack this year topped 45 Gbps

A week-long DDoS attack that launched a flood of traffic at an Asian e-commerce company in early November was the biggest such incident so far this year, according to Prolexic, a company that defends websites against such attacks.

The distributed denial-of-service attack consisted of four consecutive waves launched from multiple botnets between Nov. 5 and Nov. 12, 2011, Prolexic said. It estimated that up to 250,000 computers infected with malware participated in the attack, many of them in China.

At the height of the attack, those computers made 15,000 connections per second to the target company's e-commerce platform, swamping it with up to 45 Gbps of traffic, Prolexic said. It declined to name the company, one of its clients, citing a confidentiality agreement. The reason for the attack is unknown, but a disgruntled user or a competitor performing industrial sabotage are two of the possibilities, said Prolexic CTO Paul Sop.