Internet companies Google, Amazon and Cloudflare announced they faced their largest denial-of-service (DoS) cyberattack to date, and sounded the alarm about a new technology they warn could easily cause widespread disruption.
More specifically, Google, which is owned by Alphabet, he said in a company blog post on Tuesday that its cloud services repelled “a torrent of malicious traffic that was seven times larger than the previous record-breaking attack last year.”
The attacks were capable of generating hundreds of millions of connection requests per second
Cloudflare, an online cybersecurity company, announced that the attack was “three times larger than any previous attack we have seen.” Meanwhile, Amazon’s online services division also confirmed that it had experienced a “new type of distributed denial of service (DDoS).”
The three companies said that the attack began in late August, while Google indicated that the attack against it is ongoing.
What is denial of service?
Denial of service is among the simplest forms of attack on the Internet and works by simply flooding target servers with a barrage of false data requests, making it impossible for legitimate Internet traffic to pass through.
As the Internet grows, so do denial-of-service operations, some of which can generate millions of false requests per second. Recent attacks measured by Google, Cloudflare, and Amazon were capable of generating hundreds of millions of connection requests per second.
Just two minutes of such an attack “generated more requests than the total number of article views reported by Wikipedia during the entire month of September 2023,” Google said in its post. Cloudflare said the attack was on a scale “unseen before.”
Effects of attacks
The three companies said the massive attacks were made possible by a vulnerability in HTTP/2 — a newer version of the HTTP network protocol that underpins the World Wide Web — making servers particularly vulnerable to illicit requests.
The companies urged their enterprise customers to update their web servers to ensure they are not exposed.
None of the three companies announced who was responsible for the denial-of-service attacks, which are historically difficult to detect.
source: OT.gr
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