DDoS attacks come in many shapes and sizes, making mitigation difficult and complex. The general gist is to overwhelm the infrastructure of the target — whether routers, bandwidth, DNS or application servers. Importantly, DDoS attacks can target both application and network layers.
On August 15th 2013 a DDoS attack targeted github.com. ThousandEyes was monitoring GitHub through public agents before and during the attack and we captured the coordinated effort by GitHub, Rackspace and their ISPs to fend off the attack. While multiple ISPs were involved in the effort, for the sake of…