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February 28th DDoS Incident Report

githubengineering.com

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Re: February 28th DDoS Incident Report

#3

Wow, 1.35Tbps? That's a lot for a DoS attack, right?

According to [0] that is around 1/400th of total internet traffic per second. This begs the question: who has that kind of botnet at their disposal and why are they targeting Github?

Edit: The attacker didn't need nearly that kind of bandwidth to execute this attack. See [1]

Edit: 1/50th -> 1/400th (bits vs bytes)

[0] http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/#traffic-band

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16493497

Re: February 28th DDoS Incident Report

#4
post #3

Wow, 1.35Tbps? That's a lot for a DoS attack, right?

According to [0] that is around 1/400th of total internet traffic per second. This begs the question: who has that kind of botnet at their disposal and why are they targeting Github? Edit: The attacker didn't need nearly that kind of bandwidth to execute this attack. See [1] Edit: 1/50th -> 1/400th (bits vs bytes) [0] http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/#traffic-band [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1…

memcached reflection: https://blogs.akamai.com/2018/03/memcached-fueled-13-tbps-at...

Re: February 28th DDoS Incident Report

#7
post #3

Wow, 1.35Tbps? That's a lot for a DoS attack, right?

According to [0] that is around 1/400th of total internet traffic per second. This begs the question: who has that kind of botnet at their disposal and why are they targeting Github? Edit: The attacker didn't need nearly that kind of bandwidth to execute this attack. See [1] Edit: 1/50th -> 1/400th (bits vs bytes) [0] http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/#traffic-band [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1…

I assume this explains the apparent hugeness of the attack:

> The vulnerability via misconfiguration described in the post is somewhat unique amongst that class of attacks because the amplification factor is up to 51,000, meaning that for each byte sent by the attacker, up to 51KB is sent toward the target.

Re: February 28th DDoS Incident Report

#8
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to [0] that is around 1/400th of total internet traffic per second. This begs the question: who has that kind of botnet at their disposal and why are they targeting Github? Edit: The attacker didn't need nearly that kind of bandwidth to execute this attack. See [1] Edit: 1/50th -> 1/400th (bits vs bytes) [0] http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/#traffic-band [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1…

memcached reflection: https://blogs.akamai.com/2018/03/memcached-fueled-13-tbps-at...

Who is exposing their memcached instances on the public internet? Who is not filtering outbound UDP traffic from their memcached instances?

Rhetorical of course. Akamai should have logs of their offenders. Off to scan for offenders and notify their providers!

Re: February 28th DDoS Incident Report

#9
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to [0] that is around 1/400th of total internet traffic per second. This begs the question: who has that kind of botnet at their disposal and why are they targeting Github? Edit: The attacker didn't need nearly that kind of bandwidth to execute this attack. See [1] Edit: 1/50th -> 1/400th (bits vs bytes) [0] http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/#traffic-band [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1…

memcached reflection: https://blogs.akamai.com/2018/03/memcached-fueled-13-tbps-at...

I see. For anyone else who doesn't have any background in this attack: memcached is an open source general purpose cache that uses sockets to cache data. From what I gather, the attack here was possible because Github engineers accidentally left the memcached port open. So the attackers were able to spam memcached with large requests, and memcached responds immediately with the full contents of the cached memory (assuming, of course, that the client is localhost).

> The memcache protocol was never meant to be exposed to the Internet, but there are currently more than 50,000 known vulnerable systems exposed at the time of this writing. By default, memcached listens on localhost on TCP and UDP port 11211 on most versions of Linux, but in some distributions it is configured to listen to this port on all interfaces by default.

Yikes!

Re: February 28th DDoS Incident Report

#10
post #3

Wow, 1.35Tbps? That's a lot for a DoS attack, right?

According to [0] that is around 1/400th of total internet traffic per second. This begs the question: who has that kind of botnet at their disposal and why are they targeting Github? Edit: The attacker didn't need nearly that kind of bandwidth to execute this attack. See [1] Edit: 1/50th -> 1/400th (bits vs bytes) [0] http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/#traffic-band [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1…

It's in bit/sec not byte/sec so 8x lower.
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