Tech Leaders Defend Against Unprecedented Cyber Attack
Prominent tech firms, including Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare, have successfully countered the largest ever denial of service attack on the internet. They’ve also highlighted a new technique that poses a significant threat to widespread online operations.
Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, shared in a recent post that their cloud platforms successfully thwarted a major surge of unsolicited data traffic. This was over seven times the size of any previously documented attack from the prior year.
Cloudflare, a renowned internet security company, indicated that the magnitude of this latest attack was triple the size of anything they’d previously experienced. Similarly, the web services segment of Amazon.com Inc. admitted being targeted by this new variant of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
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Denial of service is a primary cyberattack strategy. Its modus operandi involves bombarding servers with an excessive amount of fake data requests, thereby blocking genuine web traffic.
These kinds of attacks have evolved as the digital ecosystem has grown, with some now capable of sending millions of false requests every second. Google, Cloudflare, and Amazon stated that these attacks began in late August and have been persistently active since, sending hundreds of millions of requests each second.
In a startling revelation, Google mentioned that just a two-minute span of one such attack amounted to more requests than Wikipedia’s total article views for the entire September 2023.
A crucial point noted by all three companies was that these cyber onslaughts exploited a weakness in HTTP/2, a newer version of the foundational HTTP network protocol of the World Wide Web. This flaw makes servers especially prone to malicious requests.
In response, the firms strongly advised other entities to upgrade their web servers to address this weak point.
While the identities of those orchestrating these cyber attacks remain undisclosed by the companies, historically, pinpointing culprits in such scenarios has always been a formidable challenge.
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