Denial of Service/Distributed Denial of Service: https://www.a10networks.com/blog/5-most-famous-ddos-attacks/

https://blog.google/threat-analysis-group/how-were-tackling-evolving-online-threats/

https://www.fortinet.com/resources/cyberglossary/ddos-attack

First off, to know what or how a thing would happen, you should know what DDos is. DDos is short for Denial of service/Distributed Denial of Service. It is a form of cybercrime that a person can use to cause Internet trafficking and flooding of a server. Motivations can vary. From proving a point to companies competing against each other.

Google has had some DDos attacks. But were going to be more focused towards the one in 2023. This attack had about 398 million requests per second(rps), basically 7 and a half times bigger. They were targeting major parts of google like Google Cloud and Google Services. They worked with industry partners to understand the attacks and protect the internet and its people. If they can’t understand or prevent these attacks, many bad things can happen to organizations not involved. They learned that the attack was using a method called “Rapid Reset” and they updated their ddos defenses and find more ways to make the issue less severe. Eventually they share info about it and things start getting better.  Google’s Blog

So in super short, Google was attacked in 2023, with many organizations falling with them. Many organizations work with Google to try and fix the issue, and they sort of do by updating their defenses causing it to be less severe. Eventually, they share info and things are sort of back to normal. They don’t mention anyone or group organizing the attack, so there is no info on if a group was held accountable

So to prevent this from happening, if you have a http workload, you could be at risk of attacks. You could check to verify if the servers are not vulnerable. Another way is to apply Vendor Patches for CVE-2023-44487 to limit the attack. If its your own server, you should immediately apply a patch when available.