DDos Attacks As High As 540 Gbps Found During Rio Olympics

Anonymous promised that they will be doing DDos attacks during the Olympics and considering the telemetry data  they seem to have kept their promise.

According to a network security vendor, in the recent two-week event, DDoS attacks were at an all-time peak value, with almost daily attacks of more than 500 Gbps. In an incident the rate reached a massive  540 Gbps. This attack is very close to the record 579 Gbps which is detected by the same Arbor Networks in the month of June.

We have included a pic at the bottom of this article which will help you to easily understand the intense increase in the attacks. Though the attacks are very small and far between, a visible brutal activity spike can be seen since the Olympics started.

Anonymous Lead

Most of these attacks track down to Anonymous, the famous massive online hacktivist group. They named it as #OpOlympicHacking.  This attack has become so popular that the group launched a Windows app which any user can install and participate in the attack process by pooling their computing resources.

Since there was a lot of hatred from Brazilians regarding the 2014 FIFA and 2016 Olympics, the attacks by Anonymous are receiving a good response.

If we go into the technical side of things, according to Arbor revealed, most of these attacks are carried out by using DDoS botnets that are built using LizardStresser, which is a DDoSing tool open-sourced by Lizard Squad in 2015.

Arbor says that a large proportion of the attack volume consisted of reflection attack vectors such as Chargen, DNS, NTP, and SSDP.

Most of the targets were organizations affiliated with the Olympics, and some of the DDoS attacks against these institutions started well before the opening ceremony.

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