"World's Biggest Cyberattack" really isn't

But it's quite a headline:

Internet speeds around the world have noticeably slowed down due to a massive "distributed denial of service" attack, reports the BBC.

These DDoS attacks bombard targeted web servers with so much dummy traffic that people trying to access a site for legitimate purposes are unable to do so. It's most analogous to a traffic jam on a highway with no one able to move.

The BBC says that security experts are describing it as "the biggest cyber-attack in history."

It may be the fastest - 300 Gbps of attack traffic is a pretty darn huge amount of traffic.  It's coming from all over the 'net, and the slowdowns are mostly local as zombie computers in a particular region spew attack traffic, clogging regional links.  There are reports of intermittent NetFlix slowdowns or outages, and it's from this.

But this really isn't anything new.  Old attacks are scaled up.  I thought the recent incident where a vast botnet army scanned the entire IPv4 address space in 30 minutes to be much more impressive.