Krebs on Security, the website of renowned security researcher Brian Krebs, has been the target of a record cyber attack.
The ex-Washington Post researcher’s blog is one of top sites for in-depth security news and investigations, and was instrumental in helping to break the Ashley Madison scandal last year.
And according to recent reports, the site has just been the target of one of the biggest DDoS attacks ever seen, said to be linked to the journalist’s recent article about vDOS, a service that Krebs alleged to be carrying out cyber-attacks on behalf of its customers.
The cloud-hosting company Akamai that hosts Krebs’ site had to remove the site from its network, after it was hit with 620 gigabits of traffic every second.
Akamai’s Martin McKeay said this was almost double the size of its previous biggest attack earlier this year, which clocked in at 363 Gbps.
Holy moly. Prolexic reports my site was just hit with the largest DDOS the internet has ever seen. 665 Gbps. Site’s still up. #FAIL
– briankrebs (@briankrebs) September 21, 2016
In an blog post, Krebs said: “The attack did not succeed thanks to the hard work of the engineers at Akamai, the company that protects my site from such digital sieges.
“But according to Akamai, it was nearly double the size of the largest attack they’d seen previously, and was among the biggest assaults the Internet has ever witnessed.
“The attack began around 8 p.m. ET on Sept. 20, and initial reports put it at approximately 665 Gigabits of traffic per second.
“Additional analysis on the attack traffic suggests the assault was closer to 620 Gbps in size, but in any case this is many orders of magnitude more traffic than is typically needed to knock most sites offline.”
Two men have now apparently been arrested and released on bail for the hack, and both have been banned from using the internet for 30 days.
Speaking about the massive DDoS attack, Krebs said: “I don’t know what it will take to wake the larger Internet community out of its slumber to address this growing threat to free speech and e-commerce. My guess is it will take an attack that endangers human lives, shuts down critical national infrastructure systems, or disrupts national elections.
“But what we’re allowing by our inaction is for individual actors to build the instrumentality of tyranny. And to be clear, these weapons can be wielded by anyone — with any motivation — who’s willing to expend a modicum of time and effort to learn the most basic principles of its operation.”