Google mitigated a 2.54 Tbps DDoS attack in 2017, the largest DDoS ever seen

The Google Cloud team revealed that in September 2017 it has mitigated DDoS attack that reached 2.54 Tbps, the largest DDoS attack of ever.

The Google Cloud team revealed that back in September 2017 it has mitigated a powerful DDoS attack that clocked at 2.54 Tbps.

This attack is the largest distributed denial of service attack recorded to date.

“Our infrastructure absorbed a 2.5 Tbps DDoS in September 2017, the culmination of a six-month campaign that utilized multiple methods of attack. Despite simultaneously targeting thousands of our IPs, presumably in hopes of slipping past automated defenses, the attack had no impact.” reads the post published by Damian Menscher, a Security Reliability Engineer for Google Cloud.

“The attacker used several networks to spoof 167 Mpps (millions of packets per second) to 180,000 exposed CLDAP, DNS, and SMTP servers, which would then send large responses to us.”

Google researchers pointed out that the attack they mitigated was four times larger than the 623 Gbps attack launched from the Mirai botnet in 2016.

Experts noticed that this attack is bigger than the 2.3 Tbps DDoS attack mitigated by Amazon’s AWS in February.

A report published by the Google Threat Threat Analysis Group (TAG) speculates that the attack was carried out by a state-sponsored threat actor.

“we’ve seen bigger players increase their capabilities in launching large-scale attacks in recent years. For example in 2017, our Security Reliability Engineering team measured a record-breaking UDP amplification attack sourced out of several Chinese ISPs (ASNs 4134, 4837, 58453, and 9394), which remains the largest bandwidth attack of which we are aware.” reads the report published by Google.

Menscher revealed that the attack was part of a campaign that leveraged multiple DDoS amplification methods to hit Google’s servers.

Google decided to disclose the DDoS attack today to warn of an increasing trend of state-sponsored actors abusing DDoS attacks to target online resources.

Experts believe that DDoS attacks are becoming even more dangerous and would intensify in the coming years.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, distributed denial of service)