Comment · Thu, August 12, 2021 · ND Owner
DDOS Attack
Original post in this thread
MisterYouAreSoDumb · 137 points
Yesterday we were hit with an extremely sophisticated DDOS attack. This group of people was able to get around multiple DDOS protection systems that were in place. We were down for over for over 4 hours, and everything we did to counteract them was immediately sidestepped. We would cut off access from all IPs in the countries we were getting requests from (like Russia, China, and Brazil) and their systems would automatically shift to other countries within seconds (like Pakistan, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, and Syria). To stop our server from being overloaded by the attack, we had to put Cloudflare bot checking in place on the site, so you may notice a Cloudflare message pop up when you try to load our site at the moment. That is a JavaScript that assesses if your traffic is legitimate, or if it is part of the attacking systems. Don't be alarmed. That is just Cloudflare's systems doing a quick check. Furthermore, we had to completely cut off access from IPs in almost every country in the world for a period. We have been slowly removing those restrictions as we are able to. However, if you get a message that you are unable to load the site, that is due to the current attack we are deali…
What they were answering
aristofon · 17 points
Do you think a competitor would do this? What would the incentive be?
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
Sure, we have been attacked by competitors in the past. Some certainly would do this. We are not yet sure if this particular one was a competitor, though. We may never know for sure, depending on how well they covered their tracks. However, this was the longest a DDOS attack has ever taken us down for.
Why would they do this? Well it resulted in us losing significant revenue. It likely cost them a lot less to instigate than it cost us to deal with. If it was a ransom DDOS group, they likely were trying to take us down long enough for us to just pay them off to stop. There's also the possibility we were collateral damage from another target on the same shared server on Bigcommerce. Things like this and ransomware attacks are becoming more prevalent lately. Alkemist Labs was recently taken down by a ransomware group. One of the largest consulting companies in the world (Accenture) got hit yesterday with a ransomware attack, too. Luckily the hackers only got basic internal procedure paperwork and sales brochures, but I bet the security team there is still pissed they got in at all. DDOS attacks like this are easier and cheaper to instigate these days than they were years ago, so sometimes these groups throw shit at a wall and see what sticks.