Largest DDoS Attack Smashes Record, Reaches 400Gbps In Europe

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is just a run-of-the-mill news these days but imagine a DDoS attack clocking in at the rate of 400Gbps! That's sure got to make raves. As tweeted by Mark Prince, CEO, CloudFlare, a web performance and security company - they have witnessed the largest ever DDoS attack in Europe. Mark also confirmed that it was the Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection attack. Though the target behind the attack was unclear, CloudFlare successfully stopped the massive attack.

Attackers used a technique involving exploiting UDP-based Network Time Protocol which is usually used to synchronize clocks on machines. CloudFlare said that the NTP contains a command “monolist” used for monitoring purpose which can be sent to server. It returns the addresses of many machines with which the server has interacted. This list of addresses is much larger than the sent request which makes it a great tool for attack.


Alan Woodward, a security expert and a professor told BBC that even if such protocols are not secure, they are important and one can only spot DoS attacks and make it less severe. Interestingly, CloudFlare earlier warned that NTP can be fooled easily for such attacks and the present attack was only simulation of this. Though ClouFlare refused to comment on which of its client were hit, it believed that many computers and their locations were used for this attack and huge data was directed to a single target.