Google blocked the largest denial of service (DDoS) attack to date, which had a peak of 46 million requests per second. The event occurred on June 1, but only in the last few hours was it made public through the Google Cloud blog.
According to the Mountain View firm, the DDoS attack was at least 76% larger than the previous record holder. “To give an idea of the scale of the attack, it’s like getting all the daily requests to Wikipedia (one of the top 10 most trafficked websites in the world) in just 10 seconds,” Californian experts explained.
It is true that Google uses the report to extol the virtues of Cloud Armor, one of the security features of its cloud service. However, it also presents several interesting data regarding how the attack was detected in time to prevent it from taking effect, as well as the origin of the traffic.
The US company identified the incident early on, logging some 10,000 requests per second to a client’s HTTP/S load balancer. However, that number quickly multiplied to reach 100,000 per second. That’s when Cloud Armor stepped in to prevent the escalation of the DDoS attack from causing greater harm. By blocking the malicious signature, the attacked platform was able to continue operating normally despite the rapid increase in the number of requests per second, which reached 46 million.
According to Google, the DDoS attack lasted 69 minutes, from when the initial spike was recorded at 10,000 requests per second and until the traffic normalized. Further analysis determined that more than 5,200 IP addresses from 132 countries participated in the denial of service attack. However, 31% of the total traffic was provided by just four countries: Brazil, Russia, India and Indonesia.
An alarming growth of DDoS attacks
The record DDoS attack blocked by Google in early June far exceeded the previous largest record. himself had been detected and disabled by Cloudflare in April, with a peak of “barely” 15 million requests per second, approximately. In mid-June, meanwhile, the same company mitigated another, but 26 million requests per second.
These episodes expose the alarming rise in DDoS attacks globally. The cybersecurity firm malware echoed the worrying panorama in his global threats report of the first half of 2022. In it, he indicated that the malicious events per client mitigated in that period grew by 203% year-on-year. And they rose 239% when compared to the second half of last year.
But that was not the only statistic that set off the alarm. He also reported that in the first six months of 2022 it mitigated 60% more denial-of-service attacks than in all of 2021.
On the other hand, specialists observed a trend also inherited from the previous year. Large-scale DDoS attacks are becoming less frequent, with a dramatic increase in smaller malicious events. However, despite observing a smaller number of massive events, when they happen they usually have a greater impact and duration.