Google Cloud has blocked the largest ever DDoS, one that hit peaked at 46 million requests per second (rps).
Google Cloud provides its customers with its Cloud Armor service, designed to protect against web attacks, including DDoS attempts. According to the company, one of its cloud customers using Cloud Armor experienced the largest ever DDoS attack on June 1. The attack hit 46 million rps, 76% more than the previous record. As Google points out, that is the equivalent of all of Wikipedia’s daily requests in the span of 10 seconds.
According to the company, Cloud Armor was a smashing success, helping the customer stay online despite the scale of the attack.
Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection was able to detect and analyze the traffic early in the attack lifecycle. Cloud Armor alerted the customer with a recommended protective rule which was then deployed before the attack ramped up to its full magnitude. Cloud Armor blocked the attack ensuring the customer’s service stayed online and continued serving their end-users.
Google’s service was able to identify the attack early on, giving the customer the time and opportunity to take the necessary steps to prevent it from crippling their operation.
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.
As a result, 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. They chose the ‘throttle’ action over a ‘deny’ action in order to reduce chance of impact on legitimate traffic while severely limiting the attack capability by dropping most of the attack volume at Google’s network edge.
Google is currently the third-largest cloud provider. Success stories like this, however, should help the company score additional gains.