DDos attacks are a very commonplace attack on availability. Because they are so common they’re many examples and it is important that there are protections against DDoS attacks in place.

Intro

Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks are extremely common. DDoS attacks are a kind of cyber attack that falls under the category of an attack on availability. Attacks on availability are supposed to attack a service making it inaccessible or unusable for the intended user hindering or stopping their ability to complete tasks they have. DDoS attacks are a very popular way to attack an organization’s availability. There are three main types of DDos attacks: volumetric attacks, protocol attacks, and application attacks. 

Example

Google recently stopped a major DDoS attack on October 23rd. They stopped a major HTTP/2 rapid reset attack. Google released an article stating “This new series of DDoS attacks reached a peak of 398 million requests per second (rps), and relied on a novel HTTP/2 “Rapid Reset” technique based on stream multiplexing that has affected multiple Internet infrastructure companies. By contrast, last year’s largest-recorded DDoS attack peaked at 46 million rps” (Kiner & April, 2023).  The DDoS attack worked by submitting an incredibly large number of requests and then canceling them. Google was able to fight off this attack with their load balancers as well as their protocols for fighting off DDoS attacks. This attack targeted many services that google offers that would have affected many people and organizations. Google has many customers that run their businesses and store important information in the google cloud. If this attack wasn’t able to be mitigated so effectively these businesses could have been seriously affected for quite a while.

Conclusion

After this DDoS attack google had to adapt policies to combat these kinds of attacks from happening in the future. DDoS attacks are very simple in theory, but can also cause a lot of trouble for the victims of DDoS attacks. Costing a lot of time, resources, and effort. It is important to ensure that there are protocols in place for dealing with DDoS attacks as well as the necessary technologies to deal with them.

References

Kiner, E., & April, T. (2023, October 10). Google Cloud mitigated largest DDoS attack, peaking above 398 million rps. Google Cloud Blog. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/google-cloud-mitigated-largest-ddos-attack-peaking-above-398-million-rps