Massive DDoS attack on network timing protocol

One of the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks hit the Internet on Feb. 11, according to CloudFlare.

The target was a CloudFlare and the attack appears to have been around 400G bps, Matthew Prince, the company’s CEO, told eWEEK. “We’re still collecting data from all of our providers to get an accurate scale.”

Prince declined to name the customer who was attacked. “Our policy is not to disclose the name of the customer in question without their permission, and we have not received or requested their permission,” he said. The latest attack uses a technique known as Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection. It is an attack that the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) warned about in January.