“Spam Nation” Author Hit By Biggest Ever DDoS Attack

Brian Krebs, investigative cybercrime journalist and author of "Spam Nation" has seen his website attacked by a 620 GB/sec DDoS attack. The attack is said to be double that of the rate normally witnessed by Akamai Technologies, the cloud-hosting behemoth on whose servers krebsonline was formerly hosted.

krebsonsecurity.com was hit by a sustained attack from Tuesday 20th September through to Friday 23rd September, this prompted the hosting company to remove the site from its servers. The costs of maintaining and protecting the popular blog site under such a heavy onslaught was proving too costly. Akamai provided its service to Brian Krebs free of charge.

This attack on one of the cyber security world’s most respected sites is a reminder that the era of IoT powered DDoS attacks is truly upon us. Until recently DDoS attacks in excess of 600 GB/sec were nearly impossible for all but the most sophisticated and powerful actors to carry out. Researchers have stated that such a large DDoS attack must have harnessed the power of a botnet with capabilities previously unseen - http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/krebsonsecurity-hit-with-record-ddos/. Such an attack tallies with current hacker trends as malware targeting IoT devices on the increase. 2015 was a record year Iot attacks, with eight new malware families emerging.
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/iot-devices-being-increasingly-used-ddos-attacks

There is a theory that the DDoS attack was a response to Brian Kreb’s recent articles on the vDOS service providers. VDOS is an Israeli outfit that made over $600,000 from providing DDoS services in just two years.
https://afritechnet.blogspot.com/2016/09/israeli-online-attack-service-earned.html

The good news is that Brian Krebs has found a new home for his popular blog. He was able to announce on the 25th September that the site is back and that he is now making use of Google’s "Project Shield" to protect his site from DDoS attacks. A blog posting entitled “The Democratization of Censorship” explains his recent experience in detail.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/the-democratization-of-censorship/