A French web hoster is claiming his firm has been hit by the biggest DDoS attack ever seen, powered by an IoT botnet with an estimated capacity of 1.5Tbps. Octave Klaba, the founder and CTO of OVH, took to Twitter late last week to reveal his firm was under attack from a stream of DDoS blitzes creeping towards and eventually past the 1Tbps mark. He claimed the botnet in question was initially comprised of around 145,000 internet-connected cameras and digital video recorders with an estimated 1-30Mbps capacity each – that’s a potential 1.5Tbps in total. In further updates this week Klaba said the botnet had increased by first another 6857 devices and then 15,654 more. The news follows reports last week that Akamai was forced to withdraw its  pro bono  DDoS protection of the KrebsOnSecurity site after it was allegedly hit by an attack measuring 665Gbps, then the largest on record. Dave Larson, CTO and COO at Corero Network Security, claimed the recent attacks are beginning to change the way IT security professionals view DDoS. “The internet is a powerful tool, and must be viewed with security and protection first and foremost,” he added. “Motivations for attacks, and the tools and devices used to execute the attacks, are readily available to just about anyone; combining this with almost complete anonymity creates a recipe to break the Internet.” Roland Dobbins, principal engineer at Arbor Networks, argued that IoT botnets are increasingly favored by hackers because they frequently ship with insecure defaults, are often connected to high speed internet and are rarely patched to fix bugs. “Embedded IoT devices are often low-interaction – end-users don’t spend much time directly interfacing with them, and so aren’t given any clues that they’re being exploited by threat actors to launch attacks,” he told  Infosecurity . “Organizations can defend against DDoS attacks by implementing best current practices for DDoS defense, including hardening their network infrastructure; ensuring they’ve complete visibility into all traffic from their networks; having sufficient DDoS mitigation capacity and capabilities either on premise or via cloud-based DDoS mitigation services or both; and by having a DDoS defense plan which is kept updated and is rehearsed on a regular basis.” Source: http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/web-host-hit-by-ddos-of-over-1tbps/

More:
Web Host Hit by DDoS of Over 1Tbps