Distributed denial-of-service attacks, also known as DDoS attacks, have been increasingly employed around the internet. Last month, GitHub suffered the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, with a peak of 1.35Tbps of incoming traffic, which was possible due to vulnerabilities found on memcached servers. The tools used to launch such attack were later made public on GitHub itself, enabling anyone to start one's own DDoS attack.
Of course, there are also DDoS mitigation services available for those who happen to become victim to such attacks. For example, Cloudflare was already capable of containing HTTP or HTTPS DDoS attacks against web servers. In fact, earlier this week, they were able to block a 900Gbps attack, as reported in the tweet below.
But yesterday, Cloudflare announced a new service, Cloudflare Spectrum, that extends their support from only HTTP and HTTPS protocols to any TCP protocol, including gaming services, remote server access, email, and any proprietary TCP protocol. As stated by Cloudflare product manager, Dani Grant, in the announcement:
It’s DDoS protection for any box, container or VM that connects to the internet; whether it runs email, file transfer or a custom protocol, it can now get the full benefits of Cloudflare.
In fact, Spectrum has already been deployed prior to its official announcement, being tested by Hypixel, which runs the largest Minecraft server currently available. Hypixel's servers were among the first to be attacked by the terabit-per-second Mirai botnet and was previously dealing with DDoS attacks by using techniques that happened to increase latency and worsen users' experience. But that has changed since the migration to the new Spectrum solution, and according to Bruce Blair, Hypixel's CTO, it is "the best option for any latency and uptime sensitive service such as online gaming".
Finally, Cloudflare Spectrum also features TLS termination, which helps increase the performance for specific kinds of web traffic and is integrated with Cloudflare’s IP Firewall.
Earlier this month, Cloudflare also made headlines after releasing its first consumer product ever, the 1.1.1.1 DNS service, which focuses on speed and privacy. The announcement was made on April Fools Day but was no joke, with the service currently ranking as the fastest DNS service available.
Source: Cloudflare
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