Not over yet according to Google
Internet giants report largest cyber attack to date
October 12, 2023, 1:05 p.m
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Amazon and Co. have been confronted with a huge cyber attack since August. Google writes that there were more queries within two minutes than Wikipedia articles were accessed in the entire month of September. According to the Alphabet subsidiary, the attack is still ongoing.
Large Internet companies say they have fended off the largest cyber attack in history. Amazon, Cloudflare and Alphabet subsidiary Google announced on Wednesday that this was a so-called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).
During a DDoS attack, website servers are flooded with requests until they collapse. The latest DDoS attack was seven times larger than the previous record from last year, Google wrote in a blog post. “During this attack, more queries were generated in two minutes than were views of Wikipedia articles in the entire month of September.”
The cybersecurity company Cloudflare spoke of an attack that was three times larger than ever seen before. AWS, the cloud division of online retailer Amazon, described the attack as a “new quality of DDoS events.” According to the companies, the attack began in August. Google said it wasn’t over yet.
As is often the case, the perpetrator of the attacks has not yet been identified. He is said to have exploited a vulnerability in the Internet protocol “HTTP/2”. Therefore, website operators should update their server software to close this security gap.
DDoS attacks typically do not involve theft of data. However, the affected Internet pages will then no longer be accessible or will only be accessible to a limited extent. In the past few days, many Israeli online sites have been affected. In September, the German financial regulator BAFIN became a victim.