There has been a great deal of buzz of late on the “largest ever” recorded DDoS attack. \r\n New to the scene, monster-sized botnet Mēris is raising some eyebrows with giant requests per second (rps) attacks as shared by Cloudflare (17.2M rps, reported August 19), Yandex (peaking at 21.8M rps on September 5), and KrebsOnSecurity (2M rps on September 9). Some commentary came in on Slashdot , The Record , and The Hacker News . \r\n As a quick refresher, there are several predominant ways DDoS attacks can cause outages to disrupt internet-facing infrastructure: \r\n \r\n Clogging internet pipes — bps (bits per second) \r\n \r\n Overwhelming hardware — pps (packets per second) \r\n \r\n Overwhelming web infrastructure — rps (requests per second) \r\n \r\n Overwhelming DNS infrastructure — qps (queries per second) \r\n \r\n \r\n Historically, Layer 3 and Layer 4 DDoS attacks targeted the pipes leading to an origin, attempting to fill them with bogus traffic so legitimate traffic is unable to reach its…