The popular shopping and sales app Amazon made a more than peculiar announcement. It ensures that its AWS Shield service, which protects Amazon Web Services (AWS), managed to mitigate the largest DDoS attack ever recorded. Specifically, a gigantic attack of about 2.3 Tbps that occurred in mid-February of this year.
The incident, which was disclosed in AWS Shield Threat Landscape, is detailed as a web attack mitigated by AWS Shield. According to this, we would be facing the largest DDoS attack in history, which could have caused a catastrophe of incredible proportions.
What we know about the DDoS attack on Amazon
According to the ZDNet medium, Amazon has published this report to talk about its size. It does not identify the target AWS customer that was intended to attack, but does claim that the attack was carried out using hijacked CLDAP web servers. Caused about 3 days of “high threat” for AWS Shield personnel.
CLDAP (Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is an alternative to the old LDAP protocol. It is used to connect to shared directories on the Internet, as well as to find and modify them. The problem with these servers is that they amplify DDoS traffic 56 to 70 times its initial size, which makes it the perfect avenue for rental DDoS services.
In these words, it can appear that a DDoS attack is the ideal way to bring a service down. The truth is that this is not the case; They have become quite a rarity, and it has a why Internet service providers as well as content delivery networks and other security agents are in charge of mitigating these attacks, making them very ineffective. Today, the most common attacks do not usually reach such high figures, these cases being the rarest to see. Uusually, the most common ones generate a maximum bandwidth of about 500 Gbps, which, although it is a very high figure, is far from the 2.3 Tbps generated against Amazon’s AWS.
