A significant milestone occurred with the reported largest DDoS attack on Amazon Web Services (AWS) reaching 2.3 terabits per second. This is a substantial increase of 70% from the previous record holder, the Memcached-based GitHub DDoS attack in 2018, which measured 1.35 terabits per second. Over the years, these attention-grabbing performance gains in DDoS attacks have been rising consistently, with major high-profile attacks happening every two years.

The term of the day is DDoS-for-hire, a service that allows anyone to purchase and carry out a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This type of service is modeled after the Software as a service (SaaS) business model and is often profitable because it allows the operator of an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet to conduct a cost-effective attack.

Today's term is cipher suite, a combination of algorithms that are used in cryptography to secure communication between servers and clients. A cipher suite includes a series of ciphers that fulfill various purposes, such as key generation, authorization, and integrity checksumming. These ciphers ensure the confidentiality and authenticity of the information being transmitted by encrypting and decrypting it. The client and web server negotiate and agree on the specific cipher suite to be used for their communication.

Today we'll be discussing CGNAT, or Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation. This technology was created to address the finite number of public IP addresses that were available under the IPv4 protocol. In the 1980s, it was anticipated that each computer would have its own unique public IP address, but the total number of addresses available, 4 billion, eventually ran out. As a result, IPv6 was developed to address the limited address space of IPv4, but it is not backwards compatible.

Navigating the digital landscape can present performance and security challenges. Interruptions caused by jitter and downtime can negatively impact the performance of your applications. Additionally, modern cyber threats, including DDoS attacks and encrypted malware, can compromise data and disrupt operations.

In the same way that conventional software relies on application load balancers for dependability, accessibility, and efficiency, a cloud-based setup necessitates a cloud load balancer to distribute workloads across a company's cloud resources. It's crucial to balance the traffic of Kubernetes applications for optimal user experience. A cloud load balancer spreads network traffic across multiple clouds and load balancing traffic for Kubernetes applications, allowing for the distribution of demand evenly across the Kubernetes pods that constitute the service.

With the growing number of botnets escalating the danger of denial of service attacks, companies are increasing their focus on DDoS defense. The Zero Trust architecture plays a crucial role in this endeavor, helping to secure networks from being used as weapons and ensuring that only verified and authorized individuals can access resources.

Cyber criminals are individuals or groups of people who use computers and networks to commit online crimes. Sometimes using malware programs, they aim to harm other individuals, companies, and governments. Though their methods are varied, cyber criminals frequently employ ransomware, holding your data hostage; and data exfiltration, the unauthorized extraction of your data. Guarding against cyber crime requires the awareness and participation of everyone in an organization.

An infrastructure attack aims to exploit vulnerabilities in the network layer or transport layer. These attacks are called DDoS attacks and include SYN floods, Ping of Death, and UDP floods. Infrastructure attacks can be broken down into two subcategories: volumetric attacks and protocol attacks. Volumetric attacks focus on inundating a server with false requests to overload its bandwidth, while protocol attacks target specific protocols to crash a system.

Protecting your company's data is crucial, whether in transit, stored in a device, or a cloud-based repository. One effective way to safeguard against potential threats is through encryption. Encryption involves scrambling your data to become unreadable if it falls into the wrong hands.

Data breaches can take many forms, from an unintentional release of information by an unaware employee, to a cyber criminal using stolen login credentials to access sensitive data to a ransomware attack that encrypts a company's confidential information. The types of data that can be involved also vary; it can be personal health information, such as medical records; personally identifiable information like driver's license numbers, financial information, such as credit card numbers; and trade secrets and intellectual property like product designs.

Today's term is Kubernetes, a tool that helps manage and automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is used to orchestrate containers, which are isolated packages of an application, across multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments.