re: #164 Charles Johnson

OK, the bottom line on this outage: it doesn’t seem to be a deliberate DOS attack, but kind of a “poor man’s DOS.” We got swarmed by a fucking shitload (that’s the technical term) of bots and crawlers from China, trying to load every resource on the site directly. Probably not deliberate, but just as much of a pain in the ass as a real DOS attack.

I once wrote a DDOS routine for a co-worker of mine that was teaching a network security class. The app looked friendly, a binary - hex - decimal converter, but once started it did a brute force ping attack against a specific IP address (Located in the classroom). Thing was, when you closed the app, the attack continued. This was running on about 20 machines in the room, with a minimum of 10 instances each. Since the room wasn’t going to be connected to the rest of the network for this, we weren’t too concerned. Problem was that without thinking he put the room back on the network, and since the computer it was targeting was turned off at that point, it flooded our network to something like 90%+ Capacity and absolutely crashed our production network at 3 pm on the last sales day of the month. One of 2 times I really thought my door card wouldn’t work the next morning.

RBS