In February 2018, the version-control hosting service company was hit with a massive denial of service attack, with 1.35 TB per second of traffic hitting the popular site.
Security commentators found the sheer scale of the assault worrying. They also had concerns about the infrastructure driving the attack, the attack exploited servers running the Memcached memory caching system, which can return very large chunks of data in response to simple requests.
Impressively the company was only knocked offline intermittently and managed to beat the attack back entirely within 20 minutes.
Unfortunately, thousands of Memcached servers are sitting on the open internet and there has been a huge upsurge in their use in denial of service attacks.
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