Thanks to the joint work of three security tools, the company prevented Google Cloud Platform from collapsing. Now the challenge is to keep your guard up against any further attempts by hackers.
Google revealed this week that it managed to prevent one of the largest DDoS attacks on record. With an unprecedented peak of more than 398 million requests per second (RPS), the cybersecurity incident, which took place in August, generated more requests than the total number of articles viewed on Wikipedia for the entire month of September 2023.
DDoS are, for their acronym in English, distributed denial of service attacks: An excessive number of requests for access are sent to the servers that host an important website (banks, ministries, etc.) and the server collapses. Specifically, it is when a coordinated effort is made to access a website at the same time, overloading it and thus no one can enter.
For six minutes, the technology giant endured an attack equivalent to more than 28,000 requests per second to each of the 14,000 servers it has around the world: an amount 7.5 times greater than the largest DDoS attack ever recorded.
On this occasion, hackers sought to disable Google Cloud Platform services, the set of cloud computing tools offered by the company, such as data storage and analysis, machine learning, and management tools.
As the company explained, it was able to resist the attack thanks to its global infrastructure, which allows it to absorb and mitigate DDoS before they reach its servers. “The global private network (GPN), the global load balancing system (GLB) and the Cloud Armor service were decisive”, they explained in an official statement.
While the GPN is Google's own network that connects all its data centers and points of presence in more than 200 countries, the GLB is responsible for distributing incoming traffic between different servers and geographic regions. In turn, the Cloud Armor service directly protects the Google service in the cloud.
Together, these three company tools prevented Google Cloud Platform from collapsing and now the challenge is to keep your guard up against any further attempts by hackers.
DDoS attacks, like any cybercrime, have many negative effects that can occur if they are successful. Some of them are the loss of access to online services, such as accessing your profile on social networks, playing an online video game and/or accessing your homebanking.
