As opposed to a non-malicious DDOS attack? Sorry about the snarky remark, but the headline does feel a tad redundant.
I heard someone describe a non-malicious DDOS attack (in the case of high traffic) as a website being cuddled to death.
Reddit is currently experiencing a malicious DDoS attack
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Re: Reddit is currently experiencing a malicious DDoS attack
#32Could this have something to do with reddit's co founder speaking against CISPA and calling out major tech companies? [1] Considering reddit played a big role in killing SOPA, CISPA backers feel threatened? [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5570670
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.
I would think it is a malicious attack in response to Reddit incorrectly identifying and popularizing the idea that Sunil Tripathi was one of the Boston Marathon bombers.
Re: Reddit is currently experiencing a malicious DDoS attack
#33Is there a defense against DDoS attacks? CloudFlare? Incapsula? Does anyone have experience with how well these solutions work?
In ultra-simple terms you need to have a network capacity greater than the attacker and to identify the attack requests and discard them whilst still honouring valid requests. 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 y…
how is adding things like caches adding a CDN?
Re: Reddit is currently experiencing a malicious DDoS attack
#34Reddit also got hammered pretty hard by legitimate traffic last night. There were many thousands of people in the Boston live update threads hitting refresh over and over all night. The admins actually locked the first update page because they said that so much traffic on an article with so many comments would crash the site.
If there's a malicious DDOS attack then this surge in legitimate traffic likely compounded the problem.
The update threads: [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1co395/live_updates_of... [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1cnwms/mods_removed_th...
Where the updates moved when reddit went down: [3] https://twitter.com/JpDeathBlade
Re: Reddit is currently experiencing a malicious DDoS attack
#35I hope this is a retaliation for the abhorrent behaviour of reddit users in blind smearing of innocent individuals in an attempt to prove the worth of social media/the internet/their "community". Information is dangerous when it is placed in the hands of these clowns and reddit needs to address their problems quickly before they ruin more lives. http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2013/04/reddit-bos...
Actually posts containing speculations about Sunil (missing student) were instantaneously deleted (as groundless and potentially harmful) , at least before name appeared on police scanner, at least on r/findbostonbombers. Info was spread somewhere else, because new people constantly were creating ones.
Re: Reddit is currently experiencing a malicious DDoS attack
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
In ultra-simple terms you need to have a network capacity greater than the attacker and to identify the attack requests and discard them whilst still honouring valid requests. 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 y…
how is adding things like caches adding a CDN?
I probably should have clarified that by caches I mean reverse proxy caches that can take up the work of serving static resources from the network edge.
The combination of adding caches and distributing those caches is to add a CDN.
You add caches to stop the request reaching a backend and doing the work twice, for optimisation. But in effect they become defensive shields as serving a static file or an in-memory file is less work and can be handled in far greater numbers than doing the work on the backend, and if one cache is attacked users accessing other caches elsewhere in the world continue to get their requests served.
If you then place a cache at every point at which your site is surfaced, for example you use DNS anycast to have your front-end appear to be surfaced from every Amazon datacenter and the closest one is nearly always selected... then you've helped stop requests at the first opportunity and to return them from a place which can handle far greater requests.
You've increase your network capacity, increased the ability to serve valid requests, and you've prevented all of that traffic reaching the backends.
And in doing all of this... placing caches for static resources throughout the world and using DNS anycast to return the cached item from the closest peer... well, you have created a CDN. A primitive one for sure, but it still is one.
Re: Reddit is currently experiencing a malicious DDoS attack
#37Re: Reddit is currently experiencing a malicious DDoS attack
#38what is impact of this "DDOS" attack on reddit?
Re: Reddit is currently experiencing a malicious DDoS attack
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
I don't have data to back me up other than an anecdotal 'I seem to notice', but doesn't reddit often become unusable during exceptional usage spikes? the Obama AMA comes to mind. 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%…
But reddit confirmed it's malicious, so the idea that reddit DDOSed itself is out of the question.
Re: Reddit is currently experiencing a malicious DDoS attack
#40Earlier 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.
I would think it is a malicious attack in response to Reddit incorrectly identifying and popularizing the idea that Sunil Tripathi was one of the Boston Marathon bombers.
Unlikely, why would someone retaliate? Who on Tripathi's side has such power? Right now we are not even sure if the attack is related to boston events at all.