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My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

dannyguo.com

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Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#71

Post by thaumasiotes »

vsnf wrote: post #30
fragmede wrote: post #26

The princely sum of $5,000. We got that at my employer back in 2016. We got hit by a ddos, and decided to ignore it, though we did dig up some BTC just in case. We enacted a bunch of DDoS protection as a result, costing way more than $5,000, but not paying money to extortionists is worth every penny.

The problem with paying extortion or ransoms is that you incentivize the attacker to come back and do it again. It may have been $5k to pay off one attacker and more than that to build the defense, but now you have defenses and are less likely to suffer attackers in the future. And as you say, not paying money to criminals is inherently worthwhile.

It is often a temptation to a rich and lazy nation

To puff and look important and to say

Though we know we should defeat you

We have not the time to beat you

We will therefore give you cash to go away

And that is called paying the Dane-Geld

And we've proved it again and again

That if once you have paid him the Dane-Geld

You never get rid of the Dane

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#72

Post by kalleboo »

earth2mars wrote: post #69
btilly wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know how he knew. There are two types of sound in rock. P and S waves. P waves are pressure waves and go faster. S waves go side to side and are a bit slower. So you cat was woken by a hiss from the P waves, which arrive a bit before the earthquake that you can feel. See https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/physical/oce... to verify that there are two types of waves, and the P waves arrive first.

This seems like a good sensor to build for early detection. Is that what the sensors do?

Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japa...

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#73

Post by thaumasiotes »

derefr wrote: post #45
macintux wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my all-time favorite novels, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, includes an anecdote: a crow's call wakes up someone who's sleeping outdoors, just as a large cat (a tiger, perhaps) is sneaking up on him. One character suggests the crow was trying to warn the man. Another posits the bird was bringing the sleeper to the tiger's attention so it could enjoy the scraps after the meal.

Odd that the most obvious hypothesis wasn't given: the crow was probably using its alarm call to warn other crows. Crows are social animals, who care about the fates of their "friends and acquaintances" — so they would do that. But also, on a tangent, there is a bird that does this kind of non-conspecific alarm calling the time as part of its food-gathering strategy: the African fork-tailed drongo. The drongo gives t…

There's also an African bird whose foraging strategy includes alerting large mammals to the presence of food that they can harvest and the bird can scavenge.

In fact, there is a family of such birds, the honeywarblers, who locate beehives, then find humans and lead them to the beehives.

Wikipedia says that the behavior is dying out because there aren't enough human foragers.

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#74

Post by flakes »

jmprspret wrote: post #52
exabrial wrote: post #51

We don’t have very many earthquakes in Kansas… but I remember the first/only one I felt. I was sound asleep when my Siamese woke me up by pawing my face… he then went and sat on the edge of the bed and growled aggressively (very out of character)… Not 30s later, things started shaking. No idea how he knew, but it was pretty wild. He passed away in 2020, still miss him.

Cats and dogs have been known to feel/sense earthquakes before we can! In the recent NYC ones there are videos of dogs howling before any of the tremors are noticeable by people. This is a common phenomena I believe.

Yeah 100%. I live in NYC, and before the quake, our golden retriever started crying and whimpering. A few moments later we felt the quake!

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#75

Post by leo150 »

lmm wrote: post #11

Maybe the phone was silent but still flashing a screen? Mine does that in that mode. At my first job we had a guy who could spot incidents coming on the monitoring dashboard before they happened. He never managed to explain or even understand what he was looking for and no-one else picked it up, but he would just see something that made him say things were odd, and most of the time we'd get an alert shortly after.

Wasn’t the name of that guy Colin Laney

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#76

Post by card_zero »

hiddencost wrote: post #70
derefr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd that the most obvious hypothesis wasn't given: the crow was probably using its alarm call to warn other crows. Crows are social animals, who care about the fates of their "friends and acquaintances" — so they would do that. But also, on a tangent, there is a bird that does this kind of non-conspecific alarm calling the time as part of its food-gathering strategy: the African fork-tailed drongo. The drongo gives t…

It's called an allegory

No, a drongo.

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#77

Post by defrost »

leo150 wrote: post #75
lmm wrote: post #11

Maybe the phone was silent but still flashing a screen? Mine does that in that mode. At my first job we had a guy who could spot incidents coming on the monitoring dashboard before they happened. He never managed to explain or even understand what he was looking for and no-one else picked it up, but he would just see something that made him say things were odd, and most of the time we'd get an alert shortly after.

Wasn’t the name of that guy Colin Laney

Working solo w/out Frank Woodley?

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#78

Post by wruza »

sedatk wrote: post #58
aleksiy123 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand the attacker may actually have incentive to follow through and hold up their end so as to build a reputation. Making their next victims more likely to just pay. Somewhere I read that some ransomware had excellent "customer" service for helping you transfer over the payment and promptly restore your files.

“Ransomware Reality Shock: 92% Who Pay Don’t Get Their Data Back” https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2021/05/02/ransomwa...

This stat includes everyone, some of them may not research what hit them. One of my clients decrypted his database twice, after seeing on the internet that they actually send a decryption key.

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#79

Post by krab »

dguo wrote: post #43
Denvercoder9 wrote: post #10

> we didn’t have a formal on-call rotation yet. That was a deliberate decision, since being on-call is painful, and the team was good about just collectively keeping an eye out for urgent alerts. That seems like a terrible solution. Yeah, being on-call is painful, but at least I know beforehand when I'll be on-call and get compensated for it. Always being expected to keep an eye out for urgent alerts just sucks all a…

I know it sounds bad, but in practice, it really did work fine for us for quite a while. 1. We didn't experience that many incidents that couldn't wait until working hours. 2. There was never an explicit expectation to keep an eye out. We did it anyway because we were at an early-stage startup, and we all deeply cared about making our products work for our customers.

I know this from a few startups and it really is not that bad. You really triage what should wake you up and what's ok until morning. It works well as long as the technical founder is ok playing a goalie and essentially being always on call (even though others catch a lot of alarms).

It stops working when the company grows and no one understands the whole system and you need on-calls from several teams. Then the company does some formal on call rotation and it's fine again. It hurts during the transition only.

Re: My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

#80

Post by krab »

cocoa19 wrote: post #6

And I often wonder if on call is justifiable “because you make more money than most professionals”.

You usually get some extra money for the duty. And if you get woken up, the hours you spend are counted towards your normal working hours - so you aren't expected to show up in the morning after putting out a fire. Or you get some more bonus (like 2x hourly pay for the night work). That's about the balance when people are ok doing it.

But it depends on stability of your service. If it is messed up and people are woken up often, then you won't find many volunteers if they have other choice.

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