Massive DDoS Attack Leveraged Network Timing Protocol
One of the largest distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) ever seen hit the Internet Feb. 11, cloud security vendor CloudFlare reported.
The target was a CloudFlare customer, and the attack appears to have been just shy of 400G bps, Matthew Prince, the company's CEO, told eWEEK. "We're still gathering data from all our upstream providers to get the exact scale."
Prince declined to name the customer that was attacked. "Our policy is to not disclose the customer in question without their permission, and we haven't received or sought their permission," he said. The latest attack leveraged a technique known as a Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection. It's an attack that the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has been warning against since January.
