Rio Olympics Organizations Hit By DDoS Attack Staged By LizardStresser

Arbor Networks' security engineering and response team revealed in a statement that several organizations affiliated with the Olympics came under "large-scale volumetric" DDoS attacks beginning in September 2015.

"A large proportion of the attack volume consisted of UDP reflection and amplification attack vectors such as DNS, chargen, ntp, and SSDP, along with direct UDP packet-flooding, SYN-flooding, and application-layer attacks targeting Web and DNS services," said Arbor Networks in a statement.

According to Arbor Networks, a DDoS-for-hire service, called LizardStresser, staged most of the pre-Olympic attacks. Despite the attacks, Arbor Networks performed several mitigation measures to help Olympics administrators keep their systems running.