A Brand-New Botnet Is Delivering Record-Size DDoS Attacks www.wired.com/story/ele…

A newly discovered network botnet comprising an estimated 30,000 webcams and video recorders—with the largest concentration in the US—has been delivering what is likely to be the biggest denial-of-service attack ever seen, a security researcher inside Nokia said.

The botnet, tracked under the name Eleven11bot, first came to light in late February when researchers inside Nokia’s Deepfield Emergency Response Team observed large numbers of geographically dispersed IP addresses delivering “hyper-volumetric attacks.” Eleven11bot has been delivering large-scale attacks ever since.

At 30,000 devices, the Eleven11bot was already exceptionally large (although some botnets exceed well over 100,000 devices). Most of the IP addresses participating, Nokia researcher Jérôme Meyer told me, had never been seen engaging in DDoS attacks.

Besides a 30,000-node botnet seeming to appear overnight, another salient feature of Eleven11bot is the record-size volume of data it sends its targets. The largest one Nokia has seen from Eleven11bot so far occurred on February 27 and peaked at about 6.5 terabits per second. The previous record for a volumetric attack was reported in January at 5.6 Tbps.