Explainer | What is distributed denial of service attack that internet giants fended off

At its core, a DDoS attack is one of the most rudimentary forms of cyberattack, working by inundating targeted servers with an overwhelming flood of fake requests for data. This deluge of malicious traffic effectively clogs up the server's capacity, rendering it incapable of processing legitimate web traffic.

As the online world evolves, so too has the potency of DDoS attacks. Some of these attacks can generate an astonishing number of bogus requests per second, often in the millions. In the case of the recent attacks reported by Google, Cloudflare, and Amazon, the assailants demonstrated the capability to generate hundreds of millions of requests per second. To put this into perspective, Google revealed that a mere two minutes of one such attack managed to generate more requests than the total number of article views reported by Wikipedia for the entire month of September. Cloudflare further said that the unprecedented magnitude of the assault, labelling it an event "that has never been seen before".

The critical factor enabling these supercharged DDoS attacks is a vulnerability found in HTTP/2, a more modern version of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that forms the backbone of the World Wide Web. This particular weakness in HTTP/2 makes servers exceptionally susceptible to malicious requests.

In light of these revelations, tech giants are urging companies and organisations to promptly update their web servers to fortify their defences against such attacks. Ensuring that systems are not vulnerable to this particular exploit becomes paramount in safeguarding the stability of the online ecosystem.

While these industry leaders are shedding light on this alarming issue, they refrained from attributing blame or identifying the perpetrators behind these recent DDoS attacks, a common challenge in such cases.