How Creative DDOS Attacks Still Slip Past Defenses

Distributed denial of service attacks, in which hackers use a targeted hose of junk traffic to overwhelm a service or take a server offline, have been a digital menace for decades. But in just the last 18 months, the public picture of DDoS defense has evolved rapidly. In fall 2016, a rash of then-unprecedented attacks caused internet outages and other service disruptions at a series of internet infrastructure and telecom companies around the world. Those attacks walloped their victims with floods of malicious data measured up to 1.2 Tbps. And they gave the impression that massive, "volumetric" DDOS attacks can be nearly impossible to defend against.

The past couple of weeks have presented a very different view of the situation, though. On March 1, Akamai defended developer platform GitHub against a 1.3 Tbps attack. And early last week, a DDOS campaign against an unidentified service in the United States topped out at a staggering 1.7 Tbps, according to the network security firm Arbor Networks. Which means that for the first time, the web sits squarely in the "terabit attack era," as Arbor Networks put it. And yet, the internet hasn't collapsed.

One might even get the impression from recent high-profile successes that DDoS is a solved problem. Unfortunately, network defenders and internet infrastructure experts emphasize that despite the positive outcomes, DDoS continues to pose a serious threat. And sheer volume isn't the only danger. Ultimately, anything that causes disruption and affects service availability by diverting a digital system's resources or overloading its capacity can be seen as a DDoS attack. Under that conceptual umbrella, attackers can generate a diverse array of lethal campaigns.