In June of this year, Cloudflare confirmed that it had the largest HTTPS distributed denial of service attack in history. Simply put, it was the biggest DDoS attack we’ve ever seen. but successfully stopped the record attack before any real damage was done. The company revealed that it recorded attacks of 26 million requests per second.
Recently, Google announced that they detected a massive DDoS attack. The latter attempted to shut down Cloud Armor’s customer service, reaching 46 million requests per second. This is 176.92% more than the previous record. So Google’s reported DDoS attack is the largest seven-layer DDoS attack.
To put it more figuratively, at its peak this attack is equivalent to a whole day’s worth of Wikipedia traffic in 10 seconds. Wikipedia is in the top ten in terms of popularity and website visits. So this is an amazing feat of stability to withstand such a powerful DDoS attack.
“Today’s Internet-facing workloads are at constant risk of attack with impacts ranging from degraded performance and user experience for legitimate users, to increased operational and hosting costs, to complete unavailability of critical workloads.”
How Google can resist this DDoS attack
In general, Google Cloud Armor regularly protects applications (Layer 7) and websites from such Internet attacks. It uses load balancing technology to keep web services running even under these challenges.
In this regard, Google Cloud Armor claims to support more than 1 million requests per second. However, it turns out that they can successfully handle 46 million times per second of the load.
Google reports that Cloud Armor successfully detected the DDoS attack and recommended a rule to customers to block the attack, which worked well. A few minutes later, after the attacker realized he had failed, the data requests dropped.
However, Google points out that the number of DDoS attacks has grown exponentially and is being carried out by a large number of malicious bots. So there’s every reason to believe that this record might not stand for long.
