Google confirmed that one HTTPS-distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack hit their infrastructure, one of the biggest ever recorded in history.
The attack occurred on the Google Cloud services on June 1, reaching 46 million requests per second (RPS). This makes it the largest attack recorded in recent years, almost half the size of the Cloudflare DDoS episode that also happened this year.
DDoS attacks knock down entire internet services and web servers by sending thousands or, in this example, millions of HTTP requests that slow down the systems and eventually crash them.
The recorded incident lasted more than an hour – it ramped up very fast and eased out just past the hour mark. To put into perspective how massive this attack was, Google states that it’s equivalent to the daily requests to Wikipedia in just 10 seconds!
The Google Cloud Armor acted beautifully to help protect applications and websites under its powerful umbrella. The company later said that the attack didn’t have the desired effect, and that’s why perhaps the attacker ran it for a prolonged period.
The characteristics of this attack are also interesting. There were a total of 5,256 IP addresses originating from 132 countries, while the use of encrypted HTTP requests meant that there had to be a significant amount of power behind it.
So far, the attack has been pointing to the Meris botnet. But the malware behind it has yet to be confirmed.