DDoS Attack Sees Massive Numbers Of Smartphones Participate Unknowingly

If there ever was a time where strength in numbers need to be illustrated, you can always point to the classic battles of yore, where normally, on a plain battlefield with two similarly skilled generals, chances are the army with more numbers will emerge the victor, taking into consideration that everything else concerning both armies are similar in nature. Well, the same can be said in the modern day equivalent – albeit on an electronic platform, where DDoS attacks are concerned.

Apparently, over 650,000 Chinese smartphones have unknowingly participated in a massive DDoS attack, where this particular attack managed to overwhelm an unnamed web server – albeit for a very short time, at least according to the folks over at Cloudflare. This particular attack saw more than 4.5 billion separate data requests occur within a single day, where it made use of a browser-based HTTP flood. This is a method tried on small scales prior, but never replicated with so many hits. Cloudflare claimed that many of these requests hailed from China, and majority of them were from mobile devices that had app-specific user agents.

Of course, some desktops also participated in this attack, and eventually 650,000 unique IPs made up the entire attack. This is definitely a new threat to the Internet, since no real defense against such high-level DDoS attacks are in place at the moment.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Hacking