Online Gambling Site Thwarts Off 100Gbps DDos attack

An online gambling site was hit with a massive five-vector Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack last Friday which peaked at 100 Giga-bits per second (Gbps).

The site, which was protected by services from Incapsula, was struck simultaneously by a SYN flood, Large SYN flood, DNS flood, DNS amplification and NTP amplification which lasted for more than 24 hours.

Marc Gaffan, cofounder of Incapsula, explained that the DNS flood made up 75% of the malicious traffic and 20% by the SYN flood.

He went on further to say that their over-provisioning on resources including network pipes, CPU, memory and resilient DNS infrastructure was the reason for being able to endure such an attack.

Gaffan could not reveal which site was attacked and commented that they were unable to determine the location of the attackers as they were using spoofed IP addresses.

What made this attack above the norm is the fact that it utilized five vectors. It is highly uncommon for DDos attacks to ever use more than four-vectors.

According to Incapsula, 81% of attacks are multi-vector, with just 19% of attacks being single vector.

Of the multi-vector attacks, 41.3% use two, 32.1% use three, 4.2% use four and only 3.4% use five vectors.