Lightboard Lessons: Explaining the GitHub DDoS Attack

On Feb 28, 2018 the popular website GitHub was the victim of the largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in recorded history. The attackers used open memcached servers to launch an amplification attack that pushed traffic at the rate of 1.35 Tbps. Fortunately, GitHub was prepared with a DDoS scrubbing service and was able to mitigate the attack, and the attackers stopped after about 20 minutes. The unfortunate part, though, is that many thousands of open memcached servers are still out there on the Internet and could be used for a similar attack at any time. Watch the video below to learn about the details of the attack and the mitigation steps.