Biggest DDoS attack ever

san francisco - The GitHub site, which is widely used by software developers, has been the target of 'the biggest DDoS attack ever' this week. For five minutes the site was off the air and for four minutes the connection faltered. Then the attack stopped. Half an hour later there was a second bombing, but it was smaller.

In a DDoS attack, a site is bombarded with traffic. This is normally done by sending hijacked computers and devices simultaneously to a target. Real users no longer come in between, the site collapses under traffic and becomes unreachable.

However, the attack on GitHub happened in a new way. The perpetrators used the way sites are sometimes made. Behind the scenes, some information on a site is 'parked' somewhere else. That is called memcached and it can make a website faster. That 'parking space' should not be accessible from the outside, but it is often. And then he can be used for an attack.

It is not known who is behind the attack on GitHub. GitHub got more traffic during the digital bombardment than the attack that struck the entire internet in the eastern part of the United States in 2016.

The National Cyber ​​Security Center (NCSC) of the Dutch government had warned Wednesday of the use of memcached systems in DDoS attacks. The organization advised to shield such systems.