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What would the motivation be for such an attack? Any thoughts on who could be behind it?

by zapstar 6y ago

tsjq 6y ago
Some proxy engaged by the competition?
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Since they seem to be some sort of analytics service bundled into client webpages, it's possible they are getting incidentally slammed by someone trying to attack one of their clients.
  - csmattryder 6y ago
    I've seen something similar actually for our client-embedded web plugin, a web crawler hits a client's site and I see 6x traffic hit AWS WAF periodically - fortunately the brunt is rate-limited. I'd be almost certain that AWS' staff looked at the logs to determine this, they would've sorted it in 20 minutes by seeing a load of requests coming from a specific host.
dschuetz 6y ago
And why? What is "Fathom", what do they do that could have triggered such an attack? Or was that an attack to deliberately force them to turn to Cloudflare for "help"?
fargle 6y ago
Perhaps AWS needs to sell AWS Shield Advanced? Ha ha, I'm probably too paranoid.
- JackWritesCode 6y ago
  You and me both, fargle. When the attacks started, I thought someone was attacking us just so I would write a technical blog post.
asar 6y ago
I've seen a lot SEO motivated DDoS attacks in very high value money-keyword niches. An attack basically downs a site for an extended period of time. GoogleBot notices the slow speed and logs dozens of 500 errors, which can result in dropped rankings. I did a quick check for usefathom.com though, the only somewhat interesting keyword would be "google analytics alternative", but fathom ranks on page 2, which imo would not really justify an attack. Maybe there is some other long-tail keyword with a high enough value though where usefathom.com pushed small niche players out of the top positions. Also a DDoS is obviously bad for the user experience of paying customers, nobody wants their analytics service to be down or have missing data bc of downtime etc.

What would the motivation be for such an attack? Any thoughts on who could be behind it?

tsjq 6y ago

Some proxy engaged by the competition?

dodobirdlord 6y ago
Since they seem to be some sort of analytics service bundled into client webpages, it's possible they are getting incidentally slammed by someone trying to attack one of their clients.
- csmattryder 6y ago
  I've seen something similar actually for our client-embedded web plugin, a web crawler hits a client's site and I see 6x traffic hit AWS WAF periodically - fortunately the brunt is rate-limited. I'd be almost certain that AWS' staff looked at the logs to determine this, they would've sorted it in 20 minutes by seeing a load of requests coming from a specific host.

dschuetz 6y ago

And why? What is "Fathom", what do they do that could have triggered such an attack? Or was that an attack to deliberately force them to turn to Cloudflare for "help"?

fargle 6y ago

Perhaps AWS needs to sell AWS Shield Advanced? Ha ha, I'm probably too paranoid.

JackWritesCode 6y ago
You and me both, fargle. When the attacks started, I thought someone was attacking us just so I would write a technical blog post.

asar 6y ago

I've seen a lot SEO motivated DDoS attacks in very high value money-keyword niches. An attack basically downs a site for an extended period of time. GoogleBot notices the slow speed and logs dozens of 500 errors, which can result in dropped rankings. I did a quick check for usefathom.com though, the only somewhat interesting keyword would be "google analytics alternative", but fathom ranks on page 2, which imo would not really justify an attack. Maybe there is some other long-tail keyword with a high enough value though where usefathom.com pushed small niche players out of the top positions. Also a DDoS is obviously bad for the user experience of paying customers, nobody wants their analytics service to be down or have missing data bc of downtime etc.