Seven German airports have had their websites targeted by a suspected distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
The attack, which took place on February 16, saw the websites of airports including Dortmund, Nuremburg and Dusseldorf taken offline. Larger German airports, including Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt were not targeted in the attack.
In a statement, the chief executive of Germain airport association, Flughafenverband ADV said “once again, airports fell victim to large-scale DDoS attacks,” but added that “according to the information we have so far, other systems are not affected”.
What is a DDoS attack?
Distributed denial of service attacks, or DDoS attacks, see malicious actors attempt to disrupt a site by overwhelming it or its infrastructure with a large amount of internet traffic. As DDoS attacks overwhelm a site’s bandwidth, this prevents users from accessing the site.
On June 1, 2022, Google reported that it had blocked the “largest” distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on record, which had a peak of 46 million requests per second (rps).
The attack targeted a Google Cloud Armor user with HTTPS for a duration of 69 minutes and had 5,256 source IPs from 132 countries contributing to it. Google reported that the attack was the biggest Layer 7 DDoS attack reported to date and was 76 percent larger than the previous record.
In a blog post about the attack, Emil Kiner, senior product manager for Cloud Armor, and Satya Konduru, technical lead, both at Google, noted that the attack was akin to “receiving all the daily requests to Wikipedia…in just 10 seconds”.
