Google Cloud Blocks Largest Ever Layer 7 DDoS Attack

Google Cloud has said that it blocked the largest ever Layer 7 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack which had targeted one of its customers. The customer was targeted with a series of HTTPS DDoS attacks which peaked at 46 million requests per second (rps).

Google Cloud said that the attack, at least 76 per cent larger than previously recorded, was stopped at the edge of Google’s network. “To give a sense of the scale of the attack, that is like receiving all the daily requests to Wikipedia (one of the top 10 trafficked websites in the world) in just 10 seconds,” explained Google Cloud.

DDoS attacks look to cripple a service or network on the internet by pummeling the target with huge number of service requests/directing a lot of traffic on the infrastructure.

Google’s Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection was able to detect and analyse the traffic early in the attack lifecycle. It went on to alert the customer with a recommended protective rule which was deployed prior to the attack came in at its peak.

Picture Credit: Google Cloud

The attack reportedly began on June 1 when Google’s customer HTTP/S Load Balancer received more than 10,000 requests per second (rps). The attack grew to 1,00,000 rps, eight minutes later. It eventually peaked at 46 million rps. The whole attack lasted for over an hour.

The attack came in from 5,256 source IPs from 132 countries.

Google believes that the attack matched the Mēris family of attacks, known for its massive attacks that have broken DDoS records.