Google and CloudFlare survive biggest cyber attack

Google, Amazon and Cloudflare have successfully stopped the largest-known online attack

In the last week, Google and Cloudflare released details of the largest ever cyber attack in terms of volume, that has ever been received. For context, Google said “the two minute attack generated more requests than the total number of article views for all of Wikipedia in September 2023”.

These attacks are used to bring the largest of websites down, causing potentially unlimited amounts in costs. Scarily, it’s believe the attack came from a (relatively) very small botnet of around 20,000 machines, whereas often large scale attacks come from hundreds of thousands, or even millions of machines. Were that to have been the case here it could have been possible to send the same amount of traffic the entire web sees to a small number of targets.

Our advice

Cloudflare protects against the vulnerability that made the attack possible. It’s a service we use for clients that sits between the internet and their servers. It filters out all the bad traffic, and speeds up requests for everyone. It’s completely free to use (they have a paid tier which unlocks some extra features), and we highly recommend it. All clients who were already on Cloudflare are already protected against the attack (named “HTTP/2 Rapid Reset”), and we’re patching servers for all other clients.

If you’re not already on Cloudflare, we highly recommend it and can help you move over.

A bit about Reckless
We’re an e-commerce digital marketing agency with offices in Liverpool, Chester and Manchester. We help brands grow through custom websites, bespoke software development, paid media, SEO and online marketplaces. If you need a hand taking your e-commerce brand to the next level, get in touch.