An article from Networld World reads: Largest DDoS attack ever delivered by botnet of hijacked IoT devices details the recent event.
A 600+Gbps DDoS attack from IoT devices is truly remarkable. Moreover, it was not a reflection attack! The target was protected by Akamai, who had to drop them (it was hosted pro-bono) after a few days of sustained attack because it was costing too much.
There are a few elements that might make this event a game changer:
- from now on, people may want to always talk about security in IoT,
- it raises questions about protecting the little guy from DDoS, the customer here found a home at Google’s Project Shield, but obviously this is not scalable, and
- cloud protection from DDoS is not a general solution despite what cloud providers will have you believe.
To me such events bring to focus the weaknesses and fragility of the IP architecture. With billions of IoT devices projected in the future, even one packet/second (or even per minute) from a fraction of these devices would be enough to cause real damage. We all know about the code quality and ease of patching of IoT devices, this will not change.
Maybe Bruce Schneier’s near-apocalyptic thoughts are not too far off.