Top 5 Most Famous DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks are happening more frequently and on a larger scale than ever before. In fact, the world has seen almost a 300 percent increase in these types of attacks year over year, and it’s only expected to get worse. Some recent DDoS attacks over the last two decades have targeted major corporations that serve millions of customers. But what are these attacks exactly? Before we dive in, here’s a quick explainer.

An animated depiction of protection against a DDoS attack.

What is a DDoS attack? With a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, a hacker tries to infect a network of devices, like your computer or any connected device, in order to cultivate an army of bots to use in an attack against a large target. The hacker’s goal is not to hack your individual information—that’s small potatoes. Instead, they want to add your device to their massive army of bots that will wreak havoc on the servers of big companies, like Google or Amazon, for instance.

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These types of attacks have grabbed headlines over the years, resulting in everything from frustrating service outages to the enactment of cybercrime laws. Here’s a look at some of the most famous DDoS attacks to date:

The AWS attack of February 2020. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing service that serves more than 1 million companies, governments, and individuals. AWS was attacked in February 2020 and saw as many as 2.3 terabits per second (Tbps) coming into its servers. The hackers hijacked user directories on Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP) servers to flood the AWS servers with massive amounts of information. Most DDoS attacks have been using this same technique in recent years as a way to compromise AWS’s security protocols. Luckily, Amazon was able to mitigate the attack before it became a security risk for its users. At the time, the attack on AWS was the largest DDoS attack to date.

“A 15-year-old hacker who went by the name “Mafiaboy” orchestrated multiple attacks that took down the websites of companies like Dell, E-Trade, eBay, and Yahoo!”

The GitHub attack of February 2018. GitHub is a centralized collaboration platform software developers can use from anywhere in the world. In 2018, hackers saw an opportunity to use a caching system known as Memcached to manually send 1.3 Tbps of information to the GitHub servers, which means the hackers didn’t use the traditional zombie bot army. The Memcached servers made it so the hackers could amplify their attack by 50,000 times. Fortunately, the attack lasted only about 20 minutes because GitHub has strong DDoS protection protocols in place. An alert was triggered within 10 minutes of the start of the attack, and the protection service stopped the DDoS attack before it got out of control.

The Dyn attack of October 2016. Some of the largest DDoS attacks have come against companies that provide online services. Much of the motive behind this is the amount of data these companies maintain on their servers. However, DDoS attacks can sometimes result from disgruntled gamers, which many believe to be the case with the Dyn attack.

Dyn is a DNS provider and registrar, meaning they hold and register domain names for individuals and companies with websites. In 2016, Dyn was attacked by the Mirai botnet. Dyn’s impacted clients include Netflix, PayPal, Amazon, Visa, and The New York Times. The Marai botnet used an Internet of Things (IoT) army, comprised of pretty much every IoT device you can think of, like smart TVs, printers, cameras, and much more, to overload the Dyn servers. Like most DDoS attacks on large companies, Dyn resolved the attack within a day.

Animated umbrellas protecting computer hardware from a DDoS attack.

The Mafiaboy attacks of 2000. Back in 2000, a 15-year-old hacker who went by the name Mafiaboy orchestrated multiple attacks that took down the websites of companies like Dell, E-Trade, eBay, and Yahoo! , which was the largest search engine in the world at the time. Mafiaboy built a network of bots by compromising university computer networks and using them for DDoS attacks. The effects of Mafiaboy’s attacks reached as far as the stock market and led to the creation of current cybercrime laws.

The largest DDoS attack ever in September 2017. In this attack, hackers sent packets of information to 180,000 web servers, which sent a total of 2.54 Tbps of information to Google. The attack was identified in September 2017, but it was found later that the hackers had been directing multiple DDoS attacks at Google for six months. Google Cloud didn’t make the information regarding the attack public until more than three years later, in October 2020.

Other large-scale DDoS attacks. Hackers are always trying to pull off the next great heist, as evidenced by recent DDoS attacks. According to The Record, Google stifled what would have been the largest DDoS attack in the world in June of 2022. The attack peaked at 46 million requests per second, which was compared to the number of requests Wikipedia receives every day. The attack lasted about 30 minutes and consisted of more than 5,000 devices from 132 countries. DDoS attack protocols and the Google security team prevented what could have been a significant security risk for billions of users.

While your own personal experience in a DDoS attack is often nothing more than the inconvenience of a downed website, there is always a risk your device could be one of the many that’s used as part of a bot army. Antivirus software will help not only to keep your devices safe from malware, but to prevent famous DDoS attacks like these.