Google Cloud blocks a DDoS attack of 46 million requests per second, the largest detected to date

19 Aug. (Portaltic/EP) –

Google blocked in June what is considered the biggest attack denial of service (DDoS) identified to date, with a peak of up to 46 million requests per second, directed against one of its Cloud Armor clients.

The attack against the Cloud Armor client began on June 1, when the protection systems detected a first attack with more than 10,000 requests per second, which in a few minutes amounted to 100,000 requests per second. Just two minutes later the targeted traffic had 46 million requests per second.

This attack, which lasted 69 minutes, directed large amounts of traffic from 5,256 IP sources from 132 countriesaccording to Google details on the cloud blog. Four countries contributed 31 percent of the total traffic.

22 percent of the IP sources corresponded to Tor exit nodes, “although the volume of requests coming from those nodes represented only 3% of the attack traffic,” he says.

The company identifies in this attack Meris’s ‘botnet’which “abuses unsafe proxy servers to hide the true origin of the attacks”, and adds as a peculiarity that “the attack took advantage of encrypted requests (HTTPS) that would have required additional computing resources to generate”.

In June, the company Cloudfare reported of the mitigation of what was then cataloged as the biggest DDoS HTTPS attack, which registered a peak of 26 million requests per second, work of the ‘botnet’ Mantiswith 5,067 devices.