What is a Distributed Denial-of-service cyberattack?
Computer security attacks such as Distributed Denial-of-service(DDoS) cyberattacks are affecting a large number of businesses and companies all across the globe. Denial-of-service attack disrupts business systems, causes data breach, and ultimately leads to shutting down businesses due to loss of trust.
It has not been long when the technology giant and market leader Google made an announcement of preventing the biggest Denial-of-service cyberattack in September 2017. Google achieved this by absorbing a chunk of 2.5Tbps DDOS. For the record, this is the highest bandwidth cyberattack to date. Multiple attacks were planted to disrupt the systems by gathering 6-month long campaign data.
How was the biggest Denial-of-service cyberattack planned?
The Mirai Botnet attack which occurred a year prior to this one had recorded a 623 Gbps attack. This validates that the attack in 2017 was 4 times more powerful. The attackers had used million of a packet per second by spoofing various networks (approximately at the rate of 167 Mbps). A huge response was sent to Google by targeting 180,000 public servers such as DNS, SMTP, etc.
The aim of a Distributed Denial-of-service Cyberattack
A DDoS attack is aimed at flooding the victim’s service with useless traffic. This cyberattack does not reveal or expose confidential data of any sort to the public, however, if it is not brought under control, it spreads quickly and leads to loss of trust and various outages.
Some cyberattacks have no specified target as such, they just want to capture and target all the IPs of the network. This increases the complexity of building infrastructure resistant to all types of cyberattacks said Google.
This is how Google stopped the biggest DDoS Cyberattack
The major parameter that can help handle these massive attacks is understanding the capacity infrastructure and technology-wise to withstand a DDoS cyberattack of the largest magnitude possible.
Estimation of the size of the attack is possible, however, unprecedented circumstances lead to situations not taken into account. Hence it is important to always use the most relevant and up to date methods to prevent such attacks.
Google announced quite recently, the launch of Cloud Armor Managed protection. This will make it easier for users to handle DDoS attacks, build defense mechanisms, reduce costs, and will make deployment simpler. Future scope of work for Google and other giants in the internet domain is to find the root cause and try to destroy the infrastructure that launches Distributed Denial-of-service and other hazardous attacks in the first place.
