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We are under attack

en.greatfire.org

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Re: We are under attack

#211

Post by dreamins »

shaneofalltrad wrote: post #201
sbov wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean more than I already am paying them? The two colo centers we've hosted in have always helped us with DDOS issues free of charge. Maybe that's not normal, but even a former employee telling us to GTFO looks bad on Amazon to me.

Interesting when your product can be spiked, and make significant increases in profit. This looks like numbers that could potentially knock a business out of business. Reminds me of old phone bills.

If product revenue doesn't grow faster or even along with traffic (expenses) it will eventually knock itself out of business one way or another.

Re: We are under attack

#212

Post by nitrogen »

Kronopath wrote: post #47
ArtDev wrote: post #26

This is interesting. Though Hacker News appears to not be blocked, it has been flagged as "Contradictory" on certain days. Is the Chinese government blocking certain news items? Take a look here: https://en.greatfire.org/news.ycombinator.com

If you click on the day in the calendar to look at the details, the "Contradictory" status is when some of their test servers work and others don't. For this site in particular, there are several servers showing a timeout and no data received. So it's possible that HN is being partially blocked.

It looks specifically like cURL's exit value and the downloaded page size varied on some requests. It would be interesting to know what the contradictory download size was, and what the curl exit value was.

Re: We are under attack

#213

Post by dreamins »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #204
dreamins wrote: post #99

No one likes DDOSes from China. One can plead Amazon as much as one wants. Pay or get booted, there are probably 2 engineers paid 6 figures a year by Amazon getting paged for this DDOS, someone must pay for the time they spend tuning DDOS protection instead of their primary project to make attacked website accessible for everyone else. Source: worked for AWS, was oncall during similar attacks. Nasty things with those…

I used to work at AWS too. Where were you? Seattle / support?

Software engineer, I am pretty easy trackable in internets too :]

Re: We are under attack

#214

Post by dreamins »

dpweb wrote: post #151
dreamins wrote: post #99

No one likes DDOSes from China. One can plead Amazon as much as one wants. Pay or get booted, there are probably 2 engineers paid 6 figures a year by Amazon getting paged for this DDOS, someone must pay for the time they spend tuning DDOS protection instead of their primary project to make attacked website accessible for everyone else. Source: worked for AWS, was oncall during similar attacks. Nasty things with those…

How do we know people inside China are responsible?

People? No. IP/AS numbers. Where traffic lands first, on which POPs... Its pretty obvious.

Re: We are under attack

#215

Post by dreamins »

TrevorJ wrote: post #187
dreamins wrote: post #99

No one likes DDOSes from China. One can plead Amazon as much as one wants. Pay or get booted, there are probably 2 engineers paid 6 figures a year by Amazon getting paged for this DDOS, someone must pay for the time they spend tuning DDOS protection instead of their primary project to make attacked website accessible for everyone else. Source: worked for AWS, was oncall during similar attacks. Nasty things with those…

I'm pretty sure they don't make 30k a day though.

In my experience Amazon will most probably write off their bill if they refuse to pay, but will refuse further service as well.

Re: We are under attack

#216

Post by mirashii »

mirashii wrote: post #59
dewey wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of CloudFlare IPs are blocked by the chinese firewall, for a site that's primarily aimed at chinese users probably not an option. Edit: I don't actually know if this is still true and on what scale, I just know that's it's true for a website I use according to chinese users.

Even if it is true, getting an enterprise account, which is still very reasonably priced, gives you dedicated IP addresses to your site, so this shouldn't be a huge concern. Generally when under fire, Cloudflare is also happy to get you up and running and talk finer details on billing for the long term later. The bigger problem is their stance on Latern mentioned above.

Honestly a bit confused on the downvotes, was just trying to provide additional information for people who aren't familiar with working with CF. Anyone care to enlighten me?

Re: We are under attack

#217

Post by frankchn »

iopq wrote: post #189
MichaelGG wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now you DDoS the captcha system. For companies not operating with massive bandwidth and computing power, you can just overwhelm their defenses. Cloudflare can get away with it, because they explicitly set out to be able to "service" those super huge number of requests. I was working on an anti DDoS system for SIP, a UDP-based protocol. Basically the options were: 1. lockdown, just whitelist known good customers, a…

Good luck DDoSing ReCAPTCHA, I'll wait

Greatfire is unique that they want the site to remain accessible to ordinary Chinese users while withstanding the DDoS attack (so they can't blackhole all traffic from China either).

If they put a reCAPTCHA wall in front, the GFW can simply block reCAPTCHA (easy -- it is a Google property and they block everything else from Google anyway) and no one from China can access Greatfire without a VPN. Mission accomplished.

Re: We are under attack

#218

Post by anaptdemise »

peterwwillis wrote: post #97
diminoten wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my outburst, and maybe this sentiment won't be well received given the context, but I just find it to be downright unpatriotic for a US company like CloudFlare to stand there saying things like what Matt Prince says in your quote, when someone comes under attack by an opposing nation state. Again, I realize this place isn't exactly a bastion for this kind of sentiment, but have some thought for freedom here,…

Patriotism is not a justification for violating the law. Granted, modern politicians and civilians use patriotism to justify literally anything they want to do as long as it's in the name of the Homeland (similar to religious martyrs justifying anything they do as in the name of their God). Usually patriotism is the last justification used by those who have nothing else to stand on, like the KKK trying to oppress Afr…

> Patriotism is not a justification for violating the law.

Actually, it is. Patriotism, in being a Patriot, is a loaded word in the American (USA) context. Specifically, it is about doing what is good/right for the country and her citizens regardless of the law (i.e. British rule.) Or so says my recollection of American History. I mean... just look at the Patriots (rebels, in the british colloquialism) in the image on the wikipedia page for Patriot_(American_Revolution).

"The Oxford English Dictionary third definition of "Patriot" is "A person actively opposing enemy forces occupying his or her country; a member of a resistance movement, a freedom fighter."[1]. In this definition, if the alleged DDoSers are Chines, attempting to block the actions of a foreigner imposing influence in their own land, they are the more Patriotic? Which is why the term is utterly useless in this argument; Dare, any other.

> Usually patriotism is the last justification used by those who have nothing else to stand on[sic]

Thus was it written.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_(American_Revolution)

edit: add ambiguous ?

Re: We are under attack

#219

Post by lionspaw »

powertower wrote: post #126
dreamins wrote: post #99

No one likes DDOSes from China. One can plead Amazon as much as one wants. Pay or get booted, there are probably 2 engineers paid 6 figures a year by Amazon getting paged for this DDOS, someone must pay for the time they spend tuning DDOS protection instead of their primary project to make attacked website accessible for everyone else. Source: worked for AWS, was oncall during similar attacks. Nasty things with those…

Why don't providers just set up a system that creates a country-level null route for a given destination IP? And have a UI with a checkbox for the user to do it, for any selected country. It would mitigate the issue, and once it's over, the user can un-restrict traffic / or just keep blocking if it's a non-valuable source. I know you can do this on the server, using many different techniques. But this does not help a…

the real reason is because Amazon wants to do business in China, so they absolutely cannot do something like that on their end without getting blacklisted by China's government.

Re: We are under attack

#220

Post by h43k3r »

cpncrunch wrote: post #17

Move to OVH -- they offer free DDoS protection as standard, and unlimited bandwidth. I just moved to OVH after getting DDoSed. I'm paying $109/month for a quad core 3.7Ghz Xeon, 64GB RAM, dual 2TB software RAID. It's a pretty sweet deal, and I haven't had any problems so far.

Thats damm cheap. I will be looking forward to move my little blog and website to them at 2.99 dollars a month.
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