Internet companies Google, Amazon, Cloudflare and Microsoft said they survived the largest known DDoS attack, raising concerns about how easily they say new technologies can cause widespread damage.
Alphabet Inc's Google said in a post on Tuesday that its cloud services responded to more than seven times the traffic thwarted in a record attack last year.
Cloudflare, an internet security company, said the attack was "three times larger than anything we've seen before". Amazon's Web Services division also confirmed that the company was the target of a new type of DDoS attack.
DDoS is a form of cyberattack in which a targeted server is flooded with a torrent of fake data requests, causing the server to stop working and responding to legitimate traffic requests.
As the Internet grows, so does the power of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, some of which can generate millions of bogus requests per second.
The most recent attacks measured by Google, Amazon and Cloudflare began in late August, and the tech giants say they are ongoing and capable of generating hundreds of millions of fake requests per second.
Just two minutes of such an attack “generated more searches than the total number of article views reported by Wikipedia for the entire month of September 2023,” Google said in its post.
The three companies said the massive attack was caused by a vulnerability in HTTP/2, the modern version of the HTTP Internet protocol that powers the World Wide Web, leaving servers vulnerable to spoofed requests.
Google, Amazon and Cloudflare are urging companies to update their web servers to ensure they are not compromised.
None of the three companies revealed who was responsible for the DDoS attacks, and in the past it was difficult to determine who was behind them.