To put that number into perspective, ZDNet notes that the largest DDoS attack recorded was back in March 2018, when NetScout Arbor mitigated a 1.7 Tbps attack prior to February of this year. GitHub revealed the previous month it was hit by an attack with a peak of 1.35 Tbps. The attack in February was a so-called “reflection attack.” As Cloudflare explains, the attempt here is to use a vulnerable third party server to amplify the amount of data sent to the IP address of a victim. It relied mainly on the exploitation of CLDAP servers to enhance its traffic. Attacks using this protocol, which is normally used to access and edit shared online directories, have occurred since 2016.
