There have been massive attempts to shut down one of Google’s Cloud Armor customers, peaking at 46 million requests per second. This makes it the most significant Layer 7 distributed denial of service attack ever reported, and Google’s infrastructure was able to handle the surge in traffic.
According to Google, an entire day’s worth of Wikipedia visits came in just 10 seconds during this attack. Wikipedia’s popularity places it in the top 10 of all websites, so this is an incredible feat of stability to withstand such a powerful DDoS attack.
The Google Cloud Armor keeps web services running even during internet attacks of this kind by using load-balancing techniques that prevent web services from being downed. While Cloud Armor claims to support over a million queries per second, it managed to handle what would normally be a crushing burden of 46 million this time.
The attack began at 9:45 a.m. PT on June 1, ramping up quickly to its peak in about 10 minutes, which was 76 percent larger than the previously reported record. Google reports that Cloud Armor had already detected the DDoS attack and recommended a rule to the customer to block the attack, which worked well. After a few minutes, the requests began dropping, perhaps when the hacker recognized that the attempt was unsuccessful.
As a baseline for comparison, Google’s Adaptive Protection analyzes normal traffic patterns. Early detection allowed quick action to be taken to stop the attack before any disruption occurred.
Unfortunately, Google reports that the volume of DDoS attacks is growing exponentially, fed by armies of malicious bots, so this record might not stand for long.