6 ms·

You could have a "reverse DDoS" where archive.org blocks requests from Wikipedia, removing the ability to add Wikipedia citations.

klodolph 10y ago
There's no such thing as a "reverse DDoS", that's just a regular denial of service attack.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  A theoretical reverse DDoS: You somehow prevent traffic from reaching their load balancer so it automatically scales their AWS instances to zero.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Your minimum instances would always be 1 in the autoscaling group associated with your ELBs (or now, ALBs). Regardless, neither the Internet Archive nor Wikimedia use AWS or other cloud providers, as it would be prohibitively expensive. They both run their own infrastructure/ops.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      Mostly a joke, just trying to think of what that term would mean.
- smitherfield 10y ago
  What I meant was: 1. Get Wikipedia to send lots of requests to Archive. 2. Archive blocks requests from Wikipedia. 3. Wikipedia citations are disabled. In other words getting Wikipedia to DDoS Archive, so that Archive's defense hurts Wikipedia. A very silly scenario of course, just coming up with one for why an attacker might want to indirectly DDoS Archive via Wikipedia.
  - jon-wood 10y ago
    That's still not a DDoS, as its missing the Distributed element. Almost by definition if you can block all requests at source its not a DDoS, its just a regular old DoS.
  - smsm42 10y ago
    What would probably happen between 1 and 2 is that archive.org notices spike in traffic from Wikipedia, talks to Wikipedia engineers, they find out who is generating all these requests, and block them from editing Wikipedia. Though it's certainly possible to generate enough junk edit traffic to cause disruption on Wikipedia, but that's nothing new. It's the nature of Wikipedia as the resource - it trusts the internet community to be good on average. So far it worked.
- simcop2387 10y ago
  I think a reverse DoS attack would be one that actually increases the capacity of the service. I'm not sure what scenario would allow that to happen though.
  - lmm 10y ago
    Some streaming sites (e.g. 4 on Demand, IIRC) have a peer-to-peer element; you could reverse-DDOS those by running a lot of computers "seeding" (perhaps by leaving them on the page but at the end of the video) distributed all over the globe.

klodolph 10y ago

There's no such thing as a "reverse DDoS", that's just a regular denial of service attack.

cmdrfred 10y ago
A theoretical reverse DDoS: You somehow prevent traffic from reaching their load balancer so it automatically scales their AWS instances to zero.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Your minimum instances would always be 1 in the autoscaling group associated with your ELBs (or now, ALBs). Regardless, neither the Internet Archive nor Wikimedia use AWS or other cloud providers, as it would be prohibitively expensive. They both run their own infrastructure/ops.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    Mostly a joke, just trying to think of what that term would mean.
smitherfield 10y ago
What I meant was: 1. Get Wikipedia to send lots of requests to Archive. 2. Archive blocks requests from Wikipedia. 3. Wikipedia citations are disabled. In other words getting Wikipedia to DDoS Archive, so that Archive's defense hurts Wikipedia. A very silly scenario of course, just coming up with one for why an attacker might want to indirectly DDoS Archive via Wikipedia.
- jon-wood 10y ago
  That's still not a DDoS, as its missing the Distributed element. Almost by definition if you can block all requests at source its not a DDoS, its just a regular old DoS.
- smsm42 10y ago
  What would probably happen between 1 and 2 is that archive.org notices spike in traffic from Wikipedia, talks to Wikipedia engineers, they find out who is generating all these requests, and block them from editing Wikipedia. Though it's certainly possible to generate enough junk edit traffic to cause disruption on Wikipedia, but that's nothing new. It's the nature of Wikipedia as the resource - it trusts the internet community to be good on average. So far it worked.
simcop2387 10y ago
I think a reverse DoS attack would be one that actually increases the capacity of the service. I'm not sure what scenario would allow that to happen though.
- lmm 10y ago
  Some streaming sites (e.g. 4 on Demand, IIRC) have a peer-to-peer element; you could reverse-DDOS those by running a lot of computers "seeding" (perhaps by leaving them on the page but at the end of the video) distributed all over the globe.