Nah it's even better because they're considered capable defenders so it's harder.
What I'm not sure of is why Google published this. I can't figure out what their strategy is here. We never published about the attacks we absorbed because we didn't want them to know our capabilities.
Sounds like a symbiotic relationship to me. The attackers get to advertise their capability for pulling off attacks, and Google gets to advertise their ability to stop them.
Almost all (but not all) of these attacks are based on some kind of problem that leads to amplification. Advertizing that people should fix these points of exploit help everyone on the internet.
What capabilities did this post reveal the existence of? Not many, beyond it having been mitigated somehow and that it didn't cause an outage. The attackers knew that already, because they'd obviously be able to observe the system during the attack.
As for why to write about it, it's a new type of attack that resulted in almost an order of magnitude increase in attack size. That's interesting and newsworthy by itself, and publishing a concrete number gives people an idea of the size of the problem and the trendlines.
This is also something that needed a CVE, so it was going to be very public anyway. If nothing is written about it, at a minimum Cloud customers will be flooding their support reps with questions about whether the vulnerability applies to them.
Nowhere that I've ever worked published about attacks. We didn't want to validate the attackers.
At eBay/PayPal we filed patents on our DDOS shield, since it was as far as we knew the first one to exist, but that was about the only public information on it.
At reddit and Netflix we didn't actually have to deal with it because AWS just absorbed (or mitigated) it before it ever hit us. We only had to deal with L7 attacks, which we had shields in place for.
What I'm not sure of is why Google published this. I can't figure out what their strategy is here. We never published about the attacks we absorbed because we didn't want them to know our capabilities.
Unless this is marketing for Google Cloud?