Internet companies, including Google, Amazon, Cloudflare, and Microsoft, have reported surviving one of the largest known Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, raising concerns about a new technology that could easily disrupt a wide range of services.
Google, owned by Alphabet, announced in a post on Tuesday that its cloud services successfully thwarted a torrent of traffic that was more than seven times the size of the previous standard DDoS attack that was thwarted last year.
Cloudflare, a specialist in internet security, stated that the attack was “three times larger than any previous attack we’ve observed.” Amazon’s web services division also confirmed being targeted by a “new type of DDoS attack.”
DDoS attacks are among the forms of web attacks, which work by inundating the targeted servers with a barrage of fake data requests, causing the servers to stop functioning and making them unable to handle legitimate traffic requests.
As the internet landscape has evolved, so has the potency of DDoS attacks, some of which can generate millions of fake requests per second.
The recent attacks faced by Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare, which began in late August last year and are ongoing, were capable of generating hundreds of millions of fake requests per second.
Google stated in its post that just two minutes of such an attack “generated more requests than the total number of views reported by Wikipedia for all articles in the month of September 2023.”
The three companies mentioned that the massive attacks were a result of vulnerabilities in HTTP/2, the latest version of the Internet protocol HTTP that supports the World Wide Web, making servers susceptible to fraudulent requests.
Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare have urged companies to update their web servers to ensure they are not at risk.
None of the three companies mentioned the responsible party behind the DDoS attacks, which historically has been difficult to identify.
