One of my friends on an old website got DDoS'd a few times and had the site up within minutes with an external server hard drive thingy, without any "protection".

The information I have, is that we're being hit by a 500 megabit attack, they took out our main internal proxy a few days ago, since then we've been on the back-up solution (Amazon), they're still hitting us, hence the CloudFare DDoS prevention system, you will have to deal with it until the attack subsides and Jay will manage to get it back to normal.

What do you mean by "500 megabyte attack"? Like people are uploading to many things? I'm not very great with computers.

Ah...

What do you mean by "500 megabyte attack"? Like people are uploading to many things? I'm not very great with computers.

We're currently being hit with a traffic load of 500 megabit (not byte, a byte is 8 bits), we can compare this to a motorway, on a Sunday afternoon it's fairly easy, there's not much traffic on the motorway so everyone gets to their destination easily, but then it becomes Monday morning, and everyone is trying to get to work using the motorway, so traffic slows, it turns into one long queue because the road cannot deal with the amount of traffic on it.

How that affects the site:

When you make a query on the site (browse the site), you take up a node, which is usually no problem, there's plenty of nodes available for everyone, but not when the site is being DDoS'ed, the DDo'S generates traffic similar to normal users, only their only goal is to take up all the available nodes, so no-one can visit the site.

DDoS means Distributed Denial of Service, and it's meant as a way of bringing down websites and services.

What do you mean by "500 megabyte attack"? Like people are uploading to many things? I'm not very great with computers.

Basically, A DDOS attack is when multiple computers make lots and lots of requests to the server, until the server is overloaded and unable to respond to any legitimate requests from users such as ourselves. It's basically an attempt to shut off the site so that it is unavailable to its users.

There are many other methods, but that's the basic principle for you. It is illegal and prohibited by many ISP's.

EDIT: Ninja'd

Edited April 15, 201214 yr by Tom H

There are many other methods, but that's the basic principle for you. It is illegal and prohibited by many ISP's.

EDIT: Ninja'd

This is one of the reasons "botnets" exists, they are usually made without the user of the computer even knowing it happens.

Thanks guys.

let's just hope everything goes back to normal. Jay's gonna do his magic

There's not much that can be done other than wait until the attack subsides, any DDoS halfwit would know how to spoof IP-addresses so the attack can't be traced or blocked.

Remember before the server upgrades, how the site would go down whenever a countdown ended? That was because of all the people trying to access the site at once, flooding it with requests. That's the same basic thing as a DDoS, but a DDoS is intentional, bigger, and often more prolonged.

Evacuate the website until further notice? Pretend like there's been some lethal gas (attack) put into a building (the website) and you have to evacuate us! That would be fun to be evacuated...

soo let me get this straight...someone is attacking our site as well as the gtapolicemod website?

why the hell would you do something like that? Damn hackers

soo let me get this straight...someone is attacking our site as well as the gtapolicemod website?

why the hell would you do something like that? Damn hackers

They don't get enough attention at home.

Hey, $20 says they're ANONYMOOSE LEGUN LOLz

What do you mean by "500 megabyte attack"? Like people are uploading to many things? I'm not very great with computers.

500 megabits is a very large number. Lets think in terms of Megabits per second for your home Internet speed. An average Cable Internet Provider speed in the U.S. or Canada (lets say Comcast or Rogers Cable) is about 16mbps at peak performance for a decent home connection. A business connection is 100mbps at peak. Imagine five of those connections spiking a server at peak performance 24/7 that's intended for normal traffic. A lot of these botnet viruses can take over swaths of computers at once and turn them into "zombies" leaving them at the whim of whoever the attacker actually is. Bot nets commonly target businesses, but homes are susceptible to them too. I'm anxiously awaiting for Google to offer these backup services on their new fiber Internet network, as the speeds are supposed to be a one Gigabit at peak performance. The attackers are going to have to put in a lot more effort in order to take over twice as many computers for such a stupid cause, and will therefore put them at twice as much risk of getting caught.

Edited April 15, 201214 yr by unr3al

GPM was experiencing a Denial of Service attack at the same time LCPDFR was. We had a 320MB attack which sadly damaged one of switches. We are currently working to repair the issue and the site should be back up late tonight if our new security measures hold. We are implementing the same security measures as LCPDFR has along with a new switch with a better CPU.

GPM was experiencing a Denial of Service attack at the same time LCPDFR was. We had a 320MB attack which sadly damaged one of switches. We are currently working to repair the issue and the site should be back up late tonight if our new security measures hold. We are implementing the same security measures as LCPDFR has along with a new switch with a better CPU.

Thanks for the info.

One of my friends on an old website got DDoS'd a few times and had the site up within minutes with an external server hard drive thingy, without any "protection".

Unfortunately an "external server hard drive thingy" doesn't protect much from a 500Mbit UDP DDoS.