Attacker rained down the equivalent of 9,300 full-length HD movies in just 45 seconds.
Large-scale attacks designed to bring down Internet services by sending them more traffic than they can process keep getting bigger, with the largest one yet, measured at 7.3 terabits per second, being reported Friday by Internet security and performance provider Cloudflare.
The 7.3Tbps attack amounted to 37.4 terabytes of junk traffic that hit the target in just 45 seconds. That's an almost incomprehensible amount of data, equivalent to more than 9,300 full-length HD movies or 7,500 hours of HD streaming content in well under a minute.
Indiscriminate target bombing
Cloudflare said the attackers “carpet bombed” an average of nearly 22,000 destination ports of a single IP address belonging to the target, identified only as a Cloudflare customer. A total of 34,500 ports were targeted, indicating the thoroughness and well-engineered nature of the attack.
The vast majority of the attack was delivered in the form of User Datagram Protocol packets. Legitimate UDP-based transmissions are used in especially time-sensitive communications, such as those for video playback, gaming applications, and DNS lookups. It speeds up communications by not formally establishing a connection before data is transferred. Unlike the more common Transmission Control Protocol, UDP doesn't wait for a connection between two computers to be established through a handshake and doesn't check whether data is properly received by the other party. Instead, it immediately sends data from one machine to another.
A record number of cyber incidents impacted Britain’s critical drinking water supplies this year without being publicly disclosed, according to information obtained by Recorded Future News.
The exact nature of these incidents is unclear, and they may include operational failures as well as attacks. Under British cybersecurity laws — known as the NIS Regulations — critical infrastructure companies are required to report “significant incidents” to the government within three days or face a fine of up to £17 million ($21 million).
A major company made a staggering $75 million ransomware payment to hackers earlier this year, according to cybersecurity vendor Zscaler.
Zscaler made the claim in a Tuesday report examining the latest trends in ransomware attacks, which continue to ensnare companies, hospitals, and schools across the country.
A notorious cybercriminal involved in breaches has released a database containing 70 million US criminal records.
With 70 zero-days uncovered so far this year, 2023 is on track to set a new record.
The risk of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) has never been greater. Over the past several years, organizations have encountered a deluge of DDoS extortion, novel threats, state-sponsored hacktivism, and unprecedented innovation in the threat landscape.
