A cyber attack on Russian tech giant Yandex's servers in August and September was the largest known distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in the history of the internet, the company said on Thursday.
The DDoS attack, in which hackers try to flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic in order to paralyse it when it can no longer cope with the scale of data requested, began in August and reached a record level on 5 September.
'A Record Attack'
'Our experts did manage to repel a record attack of nearly 22 million requests per second (RPS). This is the biggest known attack in the history of the internet,' Yandex said in a statement.
Yandex said it had seen 5.2 million RPS on 7 August, 6.5 million RPS on 9 August, 9.6 million RPS on 29 August, 10.9 million RPS on 31 August and finally 21.8 million RPS on 5 September.
US cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, which is widely used by businesses and other organisations to help defend against DDoS attacks, said in August the largest DDoS attack it was aware of reached 17.2 million RPS earlier this year.
Cloudflare could not immediately be reached for comment on Thursday.
Recently, the internet giant announced that it is to purchase Uber's stakes in their joint foodtech, delivery and self-driving businesses, and increase its stake in a mobility-focused joint venture as part of a $1 billion deal.
In April of this year, Yandex raised its 2021 revenue forecast, saying that strong growth in newer business areas such as e-commerce and food delivery pushed advertising's share of group revenues below 50% for the first time.
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