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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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But I wouldn't have learned a cool new latin proverb.
Although it should be noted that the Latin itself is a translation, since this quote is attributed to Socrates and would have originally been in Greek.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you show me some examples of abhorrent behavior? In the few reddit threads I skimmed about the bombing everyone was surprisingly mature, especially when pointing out 'suspicious' people.
isn’t ‘Pointing out ‘suspiciuos’ people’ on a public forum rather immature by itself?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
isn’t ‘Pointing out ‘suspiciuos’ people’ on a public forum rather immature by itself?
For the most part, they were pointing out suspicious pictures , in the wake of a nearby large-scale criminal event. Not suspicious people by name.
Would the pictures, or the people in the pictures, be suspected of being bombers? Were the police looking for pictures or for people in pictures?
As opposed to a non-malicious DDOS attack? Sorry about the snarky remark, but the headline does feel a tad redundant.
"Typical HN Top-poster - up in arms about one point they care about, misses entire point of article." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4780475
I had a chuckle too about "malicious". A DDoS attack is a DDoS attack. It's like hearing about a "malicious stabbing."
But whatever, there are DDoS attacks every day on someone.
Is 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…
Basically, DDoS Attacks can be (roughly) divided in 2 categories:
1. Attacks on your server (which usually target your server IP or some other part of your network infrastructure)
2. Attacks on your site (which use bots to flood your site with fake HTTP requests)
As explained above, Network attack can only be countered with strong and flexible infrastructure. The most common solution is a combination of several high-powered servers and load balancing capabilities.
HTTP DDoS attacks are trickier because they're best mitigated by visitor profiling, a technology that can help identify bots from humans and block them while still allowing providing full access to all legitimate visitors. Developing and maintaining such technology is arguably more complicated, simply because it's a software you need to create, not a hardware which you can buy.
Standard profiling solutions include CAPTCHAs and Delay Pages but these will also repel legitimate visitors. (because no one likes CAPTCHAs or waiting for 5-10 extra seconds for page load). Advanced profiling solutions use a combination of behavior and signature recognition, coupled with seamless challenges (i.e. checking for JS support).
CF and Incapsula (where I work) both handle Network DDoS in a similar manner but we have a somewhat different approach to HTTP DDoS.
And yes, while under DDoS (or even without it), dynamic resources can be the "weakest link". This is why WAFs are so important.