Google thwarts largest HTTPS DDoS attack yet

Google has disclosed averting an HTTPS-based distributed denial-of-service attack with a peak of 46 million requests per second in June, which is nearly 76% bigger than the record-breaking DDoS attack blocked by Cloudflare within the same month, according to The Register. Threat actors commenced the DDoS attack on June 1 by targeting a Google customer's HTTP(S) Load Balancers with over 10,000 rps, with the attack growing to 100,000 rps after eight minutes and to 46 million rps after another two minutes, noted Google researchers Emil Kiner and Satya Konduru. Detection of the attack by Google's Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection service prompted immediate malicious signature blocking and the dwindling of the attack. "Presumably the attacker likely determined they were not having the desired impact while incurring significant expenses to execute the attack," said researchers, who also noted the similarity of the record-breaking attack's geographic distribution and toolset with the Meris attack family.