Web-based code hosting service GitHub recently suffered the largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack ever recorded. According to an official post on the matter, the attack, which flooded the website with traffic that peaked at 1.35 Terabits per second, crippled the website for a few minutes on February 28th.
The flood of internet traffic generated by such an attack can overwhelm any website’s servers and disable them for a considerable period of time. Akamai reports that over 50,000 such vulnerable can be found across the globe, which can be used to conduct such large scale DDoS attacks. There have been other such attacks in the past week, but the GitHub attack is the largest so far. In order to prevent any future attacks of this nature, DDoS protection providers like Akamai and Cloudflare have urged memcached server owners to firewall their servers or disable part of their functionalities.
