An intensive Distributed Denial of Service attack is currently undergoing on my blog, with HTTP request rates hitting thousands per minute. It all started few days ago when I received a message from my hosting service provider stating that my blog’s shared hosting has massive CPU/Bandwidth usage. The folks offered a solution for me that was “upgrade to a higher plan so you can meet the DDoS traffic”.. I was speechless and had to take things under my control.
Looking at the stats, the attack start moment is also obvious:
During the peak of the attack my blog was mostly down.
Victims to DDoS often ask themselves the same questions, “why” and “why me”. Generally for this type of attacks the “why” boils down to these cases
- blackmailing for money
- blocking competition
- attempting censorship
- mischief
I can’t imagine my humble personal blog falls into any of the first three categories and believe it is someone just being playful.
The attack is on-going (as I write these lines) from numerous IP addresses all over the world, but fortunately for me it is being executed in a not very smart way, so I was able to pick up a trend and catch these via a smart updating .htaccess “deny from” rule. I can’t give out much details on the exact measures as the attacker could be reading this and adjust.
The result from this blocking is obvious from the above graphs and my blog is up again.
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