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
0phenyl · 35 points
Thanks for the update. Great work dealing with this efficiently.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
I am actually in Colorado visiting family right now, and I was in the forest out of service when the attack happened. My security team was trying to get ahold of me unsuccessfully for a while, till I got back in cell signal range. Of course it would hit at the absolute worst time! I am glad my team was able to stop the outage relatively quickly.
They tried again last night at 1am. They hit us with 15 million requests in a 15-30min period. Someone was trying hard to take our site down, that's for sure.