Google Says it Mitigated a 2.54 Tbps DDoS Attack in 2017, Largest Known To Date

The Google Cloud team revealed today a previously undisclosed DDoS attack that targeted Google service back in September 2017 and which clocked at 2.54 Tbps, making it the largest DDoS attack recorded to date. From a report: In a separate report published at the same time, the Google Threat Threat Analysis Group (TAG), the Google security team that analyzes high-end threat groups, said the attack was carried out by a state-sponsored threat actor. TAG researchers said the attack came from China, having originated from within the network of four Chinese internet service providers (ASNs 4134, 4837, 58453, and 9394). Damian Menscher, a Security Reliability Engineer for Google Cloud, said the 2.54 Tbps peak was "the culmination of a six-month campaign" that utilized multiple methods of attacks to hammer Google's server infrastructure.

In this kind of war there are no winners

[ozduo]

Pistols at dawn used to solve peoples problems. Now it's sneak attacks

With cause.

[Gravis Zero]

Pistols at dawn used to solve peoples problems. Now it's sneak attacks

Pistols at dawn is a fair fight, one man's skill/luck against another's. This is a small group of people (hackers) up against an army of 100K+ (Google).

Cretins

[pele]

They inadvertently made google make their infrastructure more resilient by providing freee test services to them

Read the headline, knew who it was

[p51d007]

at that speed...HAD to be China

2.54 Tablespoons?

[RandomUsername99]

2.54 Tablespoons? Big whoop.

Re:

[Killall -9 Bash]

How many consecutive seconds can you swallow 2.54 Tablespoons per second...?

The 'china bad 'stuff asside

[Anonymous Coward]

is no one concerned that a private company has essentially defended itself against a sovereign nation successfully, not just a sovereign nation, but the largest nation in the world lost a fight against big brother incorporated, err i mean google

google has far too much power

Re: The 'china bad 'stuff asside

[maybe111]

But they dont talk about all the times gmail goes down

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[stdarg]

I got a speeding ticket thrown out once, but it would be silly to say that I defeated a sovereign state and therefore individuals have too much power.

In other words, there are many degrees of attack. Google mitigating a DDOS is not equivalent to overpowering China.

Re:

[Anubis IV]

Say the US illicitly sent CIA operatives to assassinate a business leader in another country, but the CEO’s bodyguards successfully protected their guy. Would you honestly suggest that that business was more powerful than the US, or would you instead recognize that the operatives were out of their sovereign territory, were operating illegally and without their full resources, and that the foiling of such an operation carries none of the implications you suggest? Because we’re talking about the d

Blackhole the ASNs then.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fastest way in the world to get ISPs to wake up and get their shit together.

Since when are DDOSes not coming from zombies?

[ffkom]

I have never seen any serious DDOS attempts being launched from hosts of the actual attacker. This would just be stupid, as such hosts are easy to block selectively (and even more so when they are all located in the same AS). The usual method is to utilize zombie hosts either compromised by exploiting security flaws or by simply letting gullible web-browsers execute malicious JavaScript code flooding the victim with traffic.

This story, therefore, to me sounds like the typical made up "nation XYZ bad!" prop

Re:

[dargaud]

How are there still zombies PCs ? We aren't using WinME anymore. Are there any actual (not just proof of concepts) bots that spread via Win10, OSX or Linux ? Zombies should have been detected and blocked by their own ISPs long, long ago.