Brian Krebs is a reporter who does stories on cyber attackers that attack for profit. In his line of work, he is often subject to several threats. He has had SWAT teams show up at his house before, and death threats in the form of flowers. Most recently, his website was the subject of a DDoS attack, sending 600-700 gigabits per second of internet traffic. The security company protecting his site, Prolexic, had to stop supporting his website because it was the subject of so many attacks. His site is now back up and running with Google’s Project Shield. It is meant to protect activists from DDoS attacks. Hackers are using unsecured devices from the Internet of Things, (IoTs) to launch this attacks. A botnet of 25,000 CCTV cameras was being used to launch attacks across the world.
Very interesting article. It’s scary to think that 1 Tbps attacks will become “commonplace” when we can barely defend against 100s of Gbps. I think the best way to defend against these kind of attacks is to make sure IoTs are better secured with strong passwords so that they won’t become part of the botnet in the first place.