An unnamed Asian company operating within what has been described as a 'high risk e-commerce industry' has been targeted by a botnet which launched a DDoS attack of unprecedented magnitude. According to Distributed Denial of Service mitigation experts Prolexic, which claims to have successfully combated the attack, the volume of this particular attack was nothing short of extraordinary.
How so? Well, consider that most high-end border routers employed by your average ISP are capable of forwarding around 70,000 packets per second typically. Now consider that the volume of this DDoS attack using TCP SYN Floods and ICMP Floods reached 25 million packets per second at its peak.
Prolexic were able to determine that the botnet being used by the attacker consisted of no less than 176,000 zombie computers. This in itself should be enough to raise eyebrows within the security industry seeing as the previous five attacks that Prolexic successfully mitigated featured no more than 5,000 to 10,000 bots being deployed for each.
Paul Sop, chief technology officer at Prolexic, explains that the Asian company being targeted had unsuccessfully attempted to stop the attacks for "many months" with the help of both the ISP and carrier concerned. However, the sheer volume of the packet flooding proved too much. Prolexic was able to mitigate the threat by distributing the traffic between a number of global Tier 1 carriers and 'scrubbing' network centers. Sop warns that this massive attack in Asia could be "an early warning beacon of the increasing magnitude of DDoS attacks that may be on the horizon for Europe and North America in the next 6 to 8 months" adding "high risk clients, such as those extremely large companies in the gaming and gambling industries in Asia, are usually the first targets of these huge botnets just to see how successful they can be."
