Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) are familiar strains of cyberattack to anyone who follows security news. Flooding a target with traffic indistinguishable from a legitimate surge of visitors remains a popular method for either taking down or crippling a web property, especially when combined with amplification attacks caused by hijacking other servers, spoofing connected services, or taking advantage of an internal performance flaw or bottleneck.
In 2018, GitHub was hit by what was then the largest DDoS attack ever recorded (the record was broken just five days later), clocking in at a saturation rate of about 1.3 TBps. One reason the attackers were able to achieve such a high throughput was because they relied on commandeering unsecured Memcached database servers (Memcache is a general-purpose distributed...