Attackers use Network Time Protocol for denial exploit
(Phys.org) —Reports are calling it the world's most massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever, referring to this week's report about a massive exploit making use of the Network Time Protocol (NTP), which is used to synchronize computer clock times. But how is this the largest such attack? According to reports, measuring an attack's severity in gigabits, the recent incident was over 400 Gbps. That exceeds the Spamhaus exploit, last year's record-breaker, which at its peak was generating 300 Gbps of traffic. Spamhaus, based in Geneva, Switzerland and London, tracks spam services and spam senders. The attack on Spamhaus involved misconfigured Domain Name System (DNS) servers. The servers are used to translate typed Web and email addresses into numerical addresses. Reports said the attack affected mostly users in Europe and some parts of Asia.