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
Majalisk · 7 points
Still crazy how most companies, including those with basically unlimited resources, just don’t care even now and just get hacked. May still be some years before the majority of companies bother to throw enough breadcrumbs at their IT departments/contractors/service.
With how much hacking and ransomware has been increasing, you’d think companies would not want to get hacked, but then there’s the issue of the big companies never really getting in trouble for massively fucking up as we’ve seen time and time again with the famous hacks and personal info losses over last decade.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
Accenture throws a lot of money at their security. I used to be a contractor for them. They are insane about security, which is why this group probably only got BS documents that posed no real security threat. I would have been very surprised if a group was able to penetrate Accenture's security for sensitive documents. That would be a massive deal. Someone probably is still going to get fired over this breach, though.
Alkemist Labs is still a small business in the grand scheme of things, so them getting hit is not super surprising. They were able to recover from backups, but it took a while. I am sure they have a lot more systems in place now that it has happened to them.
We have many systems in place to protect us now, but we have been beached before years ago. That's when we lost over $150K in cryptocurrency. Shit, that would be worth millions at today's prices. C'est la vie. We put a ton of new systems in place after the Alkemist breach, too. I didn't want any downtime if we were ransomware attacked. We were less prepared for a DDOS attack of this sophistication, though. We assumed Bigcommerce's systems were more capable than they actually were, but we won't make that mistake again. I am having a call with the senior management at Bigcommerce next week to do a recap on the investigation, and discuss how they will respond to future attacks.