On the 20th of September Brian Krebs, an investigative journalist, took to Twitter. He reported that his website, ‘KrebsOnSecurity‘, had been hit by a record breaking DDOS attack.

The website in question is a well known website in the field of cyber security. Bearing that in mind there are still many in hacker groups and circles that believe Brian’s work to be disingenuous.

The website was hosted with Akamai, a content delivery network and cloud services provider. In turn it was using Prolexic a DDOS mitigation platform, now part of Akami.

Prolexic said the 665 Gbps attack that hit my site tonight is almost twice the size of the largest attack they’ve seen previously. — briankrebs (@briankrebs) September 21, 2016

Brian Krebs further posted, on the 22nd of September, that ‘KrebsOnSecurity‘ would be offline for the near future. He later commented that he did not blame Akamai for this as “they were providing [this] service pro bono”.

It’s looking likely that KrebsOnSecurity will be offline for a while. Akamai’s kicking me off their network tonight. — briankrebs (@briankrebs) September 22, 2016

Attacks such as this are most commonly used as a smoke screen for other, more sophisticated, attacks. Now only time will tell for if anything got under the radar during these attacks.