Re: How would this have affected on-premises businesses?
It depends on what you mean by impacted.
We were DoSed by Google a few years back. I'm assuming one of their servers was badly configured and it was pouring 100mbps down our 10mbps line.
We couldn't use the Internet for a short time, no email, no web browsing. It didn't disrupt the business at all. All the data the employees needed was on premises, as were they.
After an hour of trying to contact Google (email auto-reply from Google "abuse" and "webmaster" saying that the email had been deleted without being read. Telephone queue said to go to the relevant page on Google.com (there is no page to deal with being attacked by Google), after 10 minutes of back and forth through the queue, the line is disconnected. Twitter - no reaction from the official Google accounts), I contacted our ISP and got them to put a perimeter DDoS prevention in place and were back up and running within 1.5 hours. We then had time to switch over to our backup connection and changed the DNS entries for our mail and VPN servers.
We were lucky, because the company had a policy of no cloud services, everything had to be on-site - many of the customers insisted that the confidential information about their production facilities was never stored or transferred over the Internet. And the company wasn't one that needed the Internet to do business.
Google were still bombarding the connection a month later, when I re-checked.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
