Largest DDoS attack ever delivered by botnet of hijacked IoT devices

Securing the internet of things should become a major priority now that an army of compromised devices – perhaps 1 million strong – has swamped one of the industry’s top distributed denial-of-service protection services.

A giant botnet made up of hijacked internet-connected things like cameras, lightbulbs, and thermostats has launched the largest DDoS attack ever against a top security blogger, an attack so big Akamai had to cancel his account because defending it ate up too many resources.

It wasn’t that Akamai couldn’t mitigate the attack – it did so for three days – but doing so became too costly, so the company made a business decision to cut the affected customer loose, says Andy Ellis the company’s chief security officer.

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