Prolexic boasted Thursday that it thwarted the largest distributed denial of service attack ever recorded (by its own measures).
The Hollywood, Fla., DDoS protection service provider says the attack topped out at about 167 gigabits per second. The company did not name the target of the digital assault.
Think about sending a month's worth of emails, attachments included, all in a second. That's roughly the equivalent of one gigabit per second.
Traditionally some of the largest attacks have reached well over 100 gbps.
"This was a massive attack that made up in brute force what it lacked in sophistication," Prolexic's chief executive, Scott Hammack, said in a press release. "Because of the proactive DDoS defense strategies Prolexic had put in place with this client, no malicious traffic reached its website and downtime was avoided. In fact, the company wasn't aware it was under attack."
The company credited its four so-called scrubbing centers in Hong Kong, London, San Jose, Calif., and Ashburn, Va., for its success. Prolexic's servers recognized the malicious traffic and blocked it at the source.
