The Mirai botnet has a powerful competitor now

The new Leet botnet was used in the DDoS attack on the infrastructure of the Imperva Incapsula company

Imperva Incapsula’s analysts have recorded a DDoS attack on the company’s infrastructure, which can lay claim to being the most powerful ones in the departing year. The power of the attack reached 650 Gb/s at its peak. As the analysis of the trash packets showed, the attack had been organized with the use of the new Leet botnet consisting of thousands of compromised IoT devices.

The incident happened in the morning of Monday, December 21. The members of Imperva’s staff recorded two DDoS attacks. The first one lasted for approximately 20 minutes, and reached 400 Gb/s at its peak. The second one lasted for 17 minutes, and its power amounted to 650 Gb/s. This indicator is quite comparable with the recent attacks of the Mirai botnet consisting of infected Internet of Things devices. According to the different estimates, the power of the attacks reached 620 to 665 Gb/s.

The experts suppose that the target of the attack was one of the company’s clients, but from all appearances, the attackers failed to define his IP address due to the protective solutions. As the result, Imperva’s infrastructure became the subject of the DDoS attack.

The attack was neutralized, but owing to the fact that its organizers used rogue IP addresses the experts were not able to trace the location of the attacking devices.