Signature
Interesting that they mention that they could identify the "malicious signature" yet never bother to name it.
Google says it has blocked the largest ever HTTPS-based distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in June, which peaked at 46 million requests per second. To put things in perspective, this is about 76 percent larger than the previous record DDoS attack that Cloudflare thwarted earlier that same month. As Googlers Emil …
All that's happening is that the attacks are being blocked, not stopped. So they are just going to become normal in the future - the current Internet design effectively "permits" this sort of thing because the Internet was setup to guarantee communications, not control them. So all we can do is try and block this sort of thing unless we work to replace the Internet with a new form of communication that is much harder to abuse. That would not be easy to do.
Not entirely true. The story mentions that when the attack is effectively blocked, the attackers purposely drop it rather than burn resources on something futile.
The attackers are clearly exploring the Internet's current best defences, presumably hoping to find weaknesses. But in the process they are also sharing information about their own resources and tactics, which can be used by the defenders. The longer an attack goes on, the more data it reveals about the attackers.
Kennedy's assassination, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and 9-11 are three randomly selected historical events which, if the internet were at the level it is today, would have arguably stress tested it.
"Legitimate traffic" is a baseline, how much algo traffic would sit on top of that?
I can think of at least three event categories that would send search traffic through the roof.
Even with events like these and even in a hyperconnected world, it takes a few minutes/hours for the news to spread. And even if, after that, every single person in the world is looking out for news (unlikely), and even if they are all looking for news from the exact same source (scarcely believable), they still would not be hitting 'refresh' every second.
46 million requests per second is probably 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more than even the most widespread massive global news story could generate.
Incidentally, Lady Di's death, while surely obsessed over by the UK press and tabloids, is of a far far lesser significance than the other 2 events you mentioned, if you're thinking about global events.