Washington (Reuters) – Major Internet companies say they have fended off the largest cyber attack in history.
This is a so-called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), Amazon, Cloudflare and the Alphabet subsidiary Google announced on Wednesday (local time). Website servers are flooded with requests until they collapse.
The latest DDoS attack was seven times larger than the previous record from last year, Google wrote in a blog post. “During this attack, more queries were generated in two minutes than were views of Wikipedia articles in the entire month of September.” The cybersecurity company Cloudflare spoke of an attack that was three times larger than ever seen before. AWS, the cloud division of online retailer Amazon, described the attack as a “new quality of DDoS events.” According to the companies, the attack began in August. Google said they haven’t finished yet.
As is often the case, the perpetrator of the attacks has not yet been identified. He exploited a vulnerability in the Internet protocol “HTTP/2”. Therefore, website operators should update their server software to close this security gap.
DDoS attacks typically do not involve theft of data. However, the affected Internet pages will then no longer be accessible or will only be accessible to a limited extent. In the past few days, numerous Israeli online sites have been affected. In September, the German financial regulator BaFin became a victim.
(Report by Raphael Satter; written by Hakan Ersen, edited by Hans Seidenstücker. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at [email protected] (for politics and economics) or [email protected] (for companies and markets).)
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