Google has revealed that a state-funded hacking unit launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against Google in 2017. The attack has been labeled as the biggest one till date.
The attack went on for more than six months and touched a significant peak in terms of traffic.
The largest attack prior to this one would be the one against Amazon that touched the peak of 2.3 Tbps in February 2020.
As mentioned in a report from Google’s Threat Analysis Group, the attack had its origination in four Chinese internet service providers (ISPs).
Google informed that the attack targeted thousands of Google’s IPs, but had no effect. Reportedly, the attacker used numerous networks to trick 167 Mpps (millions of packets per second) to 1,80,000 exposed CLDAP, DNS, and SMTP servers which sent large responses to Google, an engineer from the company informed.
According to media sources, China, despite being the source point of the largest attack, can be held accountable for only 12% of the state-sponsored attacks. On the other hand, attacking activities in Russia comprised 52% of all the attacks between July 2019 and June 2020. This is followed by Iran, that makes up 25% of the attacks.
However, unlike the attack on Google, these attacks intend to manipulate government policies and not the infrastructure directly.
