A Google Cloud Armor customer was hit with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack over the HTTPS protocol that reached 46 million requests per second (RPS), making it the largest ever recorded of its kind.
The attack which occurred on June 1st, started with more than 10,000 requests per second (rps) and targeted a customer’s HTTP/S Load Balancer. Few minutes later, the attack grew to 100,000 requests per second, and two minutes later reached 46 million RPS. The DDoS attack lasted for 69 minutes.
This is the largest Layer 7 DDoS reported to date and the volume of requests per second is at least 76% more than the previous record, which was blocked by Cloudflare in June that reached 26 million RPS.
According to the experts, the attack originated from 5,256 source IPs from 132 countries, the top 4 countries contributed approximately 31% of the total attack traffic.
Based on the geographic distribution and types of unsecured services that were involved in the attack, it is suggest to have been launched by a Mēris botnet.
Mēris is known for using unsecured proxies to send out bad traffic, in an attempt to hide the origin of the attack.
The attack was stopped at the edge of Google’s network, with the malicious requests blocked upstream from the customer’s application. Before the attack started, the customer had already configured Adaptive Protection in their relevant Cloud Armor security policy to learn and establish a baseline model of the normal traffic patterns for their service.
So, Adaptive Protection was able to detect the DDoS attack early in its life cycle, analyze its incoming traffic, and generate an alert with a recommended protective rule–all before the attack ramped up. The customer acted on the alert by deploying the recommended rule leveraging Cloud Armor’s recently launched rate limiting capability to throttle the attack traffic.
Image Credits : DSM net
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