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As opposed to a non-malicious DDOS attack? Sorry about the snarky remark, but the headline does feel a tad redundant.
Non-malicious DDOS attacks might be considered those where the traffic is genuine, like a normal website reaching the frontpage of reddit or hn.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non-malicious DDOS attacks might be considered those where the traffic is genuine, like a normal website reaching the frontpage of reddit or hn.
By definition, DDOS, are malicious no? Otherwise, the site is just having high traffic that it cannot handle. If my blog goes down after being on the front page of HN, is that a DDOS?
Getting Slashdotted or Hacker Newsed is definitely a distributed denial of service, but it's not so much an attack
Is there a defense against DDoS attacks? CloudFlare? Incapsula? Does anyone have experience with how well these solutions work?
That is basically what CloudFlare is.
Add in things like caches to prevent even valid requests from getting to the backend (so you've now added a CDN), and many peers to your network so that an attacker cannot saturate one or two peers... and you've got the essence of CloudFlare (sans features like optimising content for speedy delivery).
Ultimately the best defence to a DDoS is to be able to soak up the attack before it hits the backend, and to have enough spare capacity to keep serving regular traffic.
You can cache and distribute everything save for the valid requests to a dynamic resource (but even those you can optimise). So the whole game from a defensive point of view is to let nothing but valid dynamic requests through to the backend.
The attacker's side of a DDoS is about acquiring network capacity greater than your network capacity, identifying your weaker points (in an attempt to cause a domino effect, if they can take out a weaker peer then a stronger peer will need to do more work and itself becomes weaker). And then sending what appear to be valid requests without triggering an attack on themselves (having a 150 byte request respond with 100KB would wipe out the attackers). Bonus points for constructing requests that can get through to the dynamic resources on the site being attacked (as those are the weakest link).
I was on Reddit until 2am (EST) with no issues. Back on at 6:45am with no problem. Either they've been doing a wonderful job with mitigation, or I'm missing something (I suppose I did miss a few hours while sleeping...). If anything I figured they're getting hammered with EST sunrise/Boston incident traffic...but a simultaneous malicious DDoS attack "beyond any shadow of doubt"? Wow
We're mostly recovered, at this time.
you appear to be a bad robot
check out the rules for robots. thanks.Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's far more likely that someone decided to mess with the party all the Boston observers are having on Reddit. It's all idle speculation, though.
Yes, reddit was up for a bit and I saw two (edit: now four ) huge threads with 10k+ comments and live updates from the shoot out in Boston. So maybe they are indeed messing with the Boston live event updates thing on reddit. DDOSing reddit is no small feat, unless you have a botnet at your disposal. Should be more than just some "fun".
if you look at their numbers[1] for 2012, it's plausible that they are simply overwhelmed during these bursts and they've judged it worthwhile to let these aberrations play out.
for many operations.. moving your availability from, say, 99.9% to 99.99% is simply not worth the cost.
uptime is hard; GitHub has only maintained 99.96% for the past month[2][3] (and, IMO, they're actively trying to improve it)
[1]: http://blog.reddit.com/2012/12/top-posts-of-year-and-best-of...
[2]: https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month
[3]: http://cl.ly/image/0O2S0L3O0l3J
edit: clean up links
edit2: learning \n
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certain beyond any shadow of doubt.
What are the indicators that this is a malicious DDoS attack rather than just unprecedented traffic from interest in the Boston manhunt? Also, what reason is there for a DDoS attack on Reddit right now?
http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2013/04/reddit-bos...