One of the largest Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks ever seen on the internet has caused Akamai to dump a site it hosted, KrebsOnSecurity.com. The DDoS attack was apparently in retaliation for journalist Brian Krebs‘ recent article about vDOS, which is allegedly a cyberattack service. According to BI following Krebs reporting two Israeli men were arrested. and the site was taken down.

One Twitter post noted the irony in a security expert having his site taken down because of a DDoS attack. “Brian Krebs, the man who gives cybercriminals nightmares, has been hit with a Godzilla-sized DDoS attack,” noted cybercrime researcher, blogger and speaker, Graham Cluley, “Sad news, hope he’s back soon.”

The Attack Was Huge

Holy moly. Prolexic reports my site was just hit with the largest DDOS the internet has ever seen. 665 Gbps. Site’s still up. #FAIL

— briankrebs (@briankrebs) September 21, 2016

Before his site was take down Krebs posted about the attack on his website saying that KrebsOnSecurity.com was the target of an extremely large and unusual distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack designed to knock the site offline. “The attack did not succeed thanks to the hard work of the engineers at Akamai, the company that protects my site from such digital sieges. But according to Akamai, it was nearly double the size of the largest attack they’d seen previously, and was among the biggest assaults the Internet has ever witnessed.”

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

Later Akamai did take down the site and Krebs was understanding:

Before everyone beats up on Akamai/Prolexic too much, they were providing me service pro bono. So, as I said, I don’t fault them at all.

— briankrebs (@briankrebs) September 23, 2016

“The attack began around 8 p.m. ET on Sept. 20, and initial reports put it at approximately 665 Gigabits of traffic per second,” writes Krebs. “Additional analysis on the attack traffic suggests the assault was closer to 620 Gbps in size, but in any case this is many orders of magnitude more traffic than is typically needed to knock most sites offline.”

Krebs said that Martin McKeay, Akamai’s senior security advocate, told him that this was the largest attack that they had seen. Earlier this year they clocked an attack at 363 Gbps, but there was a major difference: This attack was launched by a “very large” botnet of hacked devices, where typical DDoS attacks use the common amplifying technique that bulks up a small attack into a large one.

Krebs last tweets about the attack:

So long everyone. It’s been real.

— briankrebs (@briankrebs) September 22, 2016

there’s no place like 127.0.0.1

— briankrebs (@briankrebs) September 23, 2016