New Delhi, Aug 20 : Google has blocked the biggest-ever distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyber attack against a user that reached 46 million requests per second (RPS).This is the biggest “Layer 7 DDoS’ to date, at least 76 percent more than the previous record as per the company.
“To provide a sense of the magnitude of the threat, it is the equivalent of receiving all regular requests to Wikipedia (one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world) in just 10 seconds,” Satya Konduru, Technical Lead at Google Cloud, said in an email at the end of Friday.
Cyber-attacks involving DDoS are growing in frequency and increasing in the size of an exponential rate.
“Our customer’s security team implemented the Cloud Armor Google Cloud Armor-recommended rule in their security policy and immediately began blocking the attacks traffic,” said Emil Kiner Senior Product Manager, Cloud Armor.
In the time following the attack began to increase in intensity, increasing from 100,000 RPS up to a peak of 46 million RPS.
As Cloud Armor was already blocking the attack traffic, the targeted workload continued to function normal.
“Over the following couple of minutes, the threat began to shrink in size, and ended at 69 minutes.
Most likely, the attacker decided they weren’t having the desired impact , and incurred significant costs to carry out the attack” claimed the company.
The geographical distribution and the types of services that are not secured and used to create the attack is similar to the Meris family of attacks.
The Meris method is known for its massive attacks , which have broke DDoS records and more, the Meris method uses unsecure proxies to conceal the actual source of the attacks as stated by Google.
The attack was stopped at nadir of Google’s network with the malicious request being blocked upstream from the client’s application.
The size of the attack will continue to increase as tactics continue to change.
Prepare yourself, Google suggested a defense-indepth plan that includes installing security and control measures across multiple layers of your environment as well as your infrastructure providers’ networks “to ensure that your web applications and services from targeted internet attacks”.
na/
