Cyber Security: AWS Thwarts the Largest DDoS Attack in History
What would happen if the largest DDoS attack in history was launched against the most important of Cloud Providers?
Just a short time ago, Amazon Web Services said that last February, the
AWS Shield
service was able to thwart a 2.3 Tbps DDoS attack, the largest ever recorded. Not bad.
But what is it all about? Let’s see it together.
DDoS attacks are a cyber threat that is as simple to implement as it is effective: capable of crashing a company, or critical infrastructures such as hospitals and airports, in a matter of seconds.
The acronym stands for
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS),
and consists of bombarding a site with requests, until it becomes unreachable.
Cyber attacks
According to data from the latest
report by Clusit
, the Italian association for computer security, it is among the attacks that affect a company every five minutes along with malware and ransomware.
And if their use has decreased compared to previous years, recording a -66.96%, their power has increased: the average bandwidth occupied has gone from 11 gigabits per second in 2016 to 59 gigabits per second in 2017. In practice, fivefold.
“These will be the next choices in the field of cyber security ,” said Andrea Zapparoli Manzoni of the Clusit steering committee to determine the chances of survival of our current digital society. At the heart of the matter is a critical issue that is both cultural and economic: we have built our digital civilization without taking into account the costs related to its protection and defense, according to a business model that does not provide for them, except in a residual way and, where possible, avoids or minimizes them. Accordingly – he concludes – these resources are not available, and today in the world we invest in cyber security a tenth of what we should reasonably spend“.
The Threat
This is no small threat to small and large companies already grappling with the greatest emergency since the post-war period.
In fact, Amazon Web Services calculated that the attack it faced was 44% larger than any other event of the same type previously recorded. The attack went on for three days, during a week in mid-February.
Thus, Amazon Web Services has published a document called AWS Shield Threat Landscape that reports the details of various attacks mitigated by the AWS Shield protection service.
AWS did not disclose the identity of the target of the DDoS attack, but said that it was carried out through the breach of
Connection-less Lightweight Directory Protocol (CLDAP) web servers
and lasted for three days.
Since the end of 2016, CLDAP servers have been repeatedly used for DDoS attacks, as they are able to amplify DDoS traffic by 56 to 70 times its initial size.
Today, CLDAP is a highly sought-after protocol for cybercriminals and is distributed over the network by several DDoS providers.
Have you ever carried out a Security Assessment for your company?
IT infrastructure vulnerabilities are at the root of all cyber security issues.
These vulnerabilities affect everything running on your network, which is why you need to find and eliminate them.
This type of vulnerability cannot be detected through an automatic assessment, but requires targeted assessment activities.
