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Google got sick of other services bragging about their much smaller attacks being "the biggest"?
by knorker 6y ago
Google got sick of other services bragging about their much smaller attacks being "the biggest"?
- hobs 6y agoCloudflare also sent out an email to this effect today.
- jeffbee 6y agoAnd Cloudflare's cited packet rate from the Moobot attack is a bit higher than Google is citing in this article. Attacks approaching 1 Gpps are pretty serious and both of these companies are fighting the problem by spending tons of money. As Google says here, "sufficient capacity to absorb the largest attacks". No magic bullet.
- fizwhiz 6y agoCapacity is a necessary but not sufficient condition to mitigate something at this scale though.
- jacquesm 6y agoI read that and thought: we crossed that barrier years ago. Then I noticed the Gpps unit on your comment and realized my error. Ouch.
- strombofulous 6y agoWhat does gpps stand for? Google is surprisingly unhelpful
- oars 6y agoWhy are people switching to the gpps unit now instead of using tbps? Each packet has a different length (due to different payloads), hence now we are switching to an inconsistent unit of measurement?
- repiret 6y agoThe capacity of networking gear isn't unidimentional - most network equipment has both a maximum number of packets per second and a maximum total throughput. I'm not in the business, but I suspect that sophisticated network filtering equipment even at the high end can have its packets-per-second capacity eaten up before it hits line speed, just like low end routing equipment can. As a result, there are some people whose ability to withstand a DDoS has more to do with packets per second than bits per second, so it becomes a useful metric.
- jeffbee 6y agoYes, a 1-byte UDP packet is just about as costly as a 1000-byte UDP packet. Considering that an ordinary PC can drive a 100gbps line interface with large frames, 1tbps is really nothing at all. But 1 Gpps is orders of magnitude more than one machine can normally send or receive.
- elithrar 6y ago> As a result, there are some people whose ability to withstand a DDoS has more to do with packets per second than bits per second, so it becomes a useful metric. Right, definitely. A large sports streaming event might (easily!) do 10Tbps across a country, even more, but each GB served may only represent ~5k requests - 10e3/8 * 5e3 = 6.25M RPS, with each request being a single packet (small GET requests). That's big, but workable across enough machines for a big provider. 500M Pps is 80x that figure - you're basically DoS'ing header processing filters in your networking hardware.
- drivebycomment 6y agoPeople are not switching. Serious practitioners always distinguished between pps, bps and rps(or qps), as they measure different dimensions as explained in the article.