The American technology services firm Google announced that it had foiled a cyberattack in early June that would be the largest ever reported to date.
So-called “denial of service”, this layer 7 DDoS attack, whose throughput reached 46 million HTTPS requests per second and which affected a Google Cloud customer, was immediately blocked and neutralized in just a few seconds, specifies the American giant which only recently lifted the veil on this affair. “This is the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack ever reported to date, at least 76% higher than the previous record,” explained a Google engineer. To give an idea of the scale of the attack, he said, it is equivalent to receiving all daily queries from Wikipedia (one of the 10 most visited websites in the world) in just 10 seconds.
The target customer had already configured “Adaptive Protection in their Cloud Armor Security Policy”, a method that helps establish a baseline of normal traffic patterns, which allowed them to detect the DDoS attack early in the process. its lifecycle, analyze its incoming traffic and generate an alert with a recommended protection rule, according to the same source.
The company also explained that to limit the scale of the attack, the protection tool automatically throttled the rate and that the customer preferred to “throttle” the attack rather than “deny” it, which reduces the impact on legitimate inbound traffic, while isolating malicious requests.
.