Cybersecurity firm Imperva says it has stopped a record-breaking DDoS attack against one if its clients on January 10. At the peak of the attack, the target received over 500 million packets per second, which is a higher packet volume than has been previously recorded.
Imperva categorized the attack as a SYN flood, in which TCP connection requests are sent to the target at a faster rate than can be processed, so traffic cannot properly be dealt with and the service becomes unavailable. According to an Imperva report, security researchers have identified two known tools that were used in combination to “launch the most intensive DDoS attack against network infrastructure in the history of the Internet.”
Read more: Massive DDoS Attack Generates 500 Million Packets per Second