New York University computer scientist Panos Ipeirotis accidentally invented a brand new type of internet attack. He calls it a Denial of Money attack, and he says others could be susceptible too. Every hour 250 gigabytes of traffic was sent out because of Google’s Feedfetcher, the mechanism that allows the search engine to grab RSS or Atom feeds when users add them to Reader or the main page. Google doesn’t want to store the information on its own servers so it uses the mechanism to retrieve it every time, thus generating large amounts of traffic.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2012/04/accidentally-invented-dos-attack-using.html