4 ms·

Hilariously, the massive media frenzy surrounding the site outage will send the site enough traffic to DDOS it, even if LulzSec never meaningfully impacted it i

by goo 15y ago

Hilariously, the massive media frenzy surrounding the site outage will send the site enough traffic to DDOS it, even if LulzSec never meaningfully impacted it in the first place.

27182818284 15y ago
My first thought too. I immediately tried to load CIA and then thought, "Maybe they didn't hack it at all but just put out their Twitter message to drive traffic at it?" Or more interestingly, if they were in the process of hacking or something and wanted the cover of a torrent of strangers trying to reach their site.
- AndyJPartridge 15y ago
  I just happened to be looking at my Twitter feed the very moment they posted, and clicked the link immediately. No go. Would this effect happen so quick? I guess they do have a lot of followers, but I'd hope that even if all of them did what I did they could survive that amount of hits?
  - madmaze 15y ago
    perhaps they were DDOSing it and brought it to a crawl, then all the other visitors streaming in would certainly give it the final blow
  - madmaze 15y ago
    The other thing to keep in mind is that cia.gov is probably not made to handle lots of traffic, since I cant imagine them having a massive day-to-day userbase.. hence I assume it would be rather easy to get them choked up with traffic
mikey_p 15y ago
I doubt it, most of these sites tend to be behind Akamai or some sort of similar CDN/reverse proxy network. This actually serves two purposes: 1) provides some security by sufficiently isolating the actual system from public access (it can be locked down to only serve requests from the CDN) 2) Prevent the type of DDoS described in the parent comment. Akamai is designed to handle the load from things like the Grammies or Superbowl. For example, it's been documented that the White House uses Akamai extensively.
- srl 15y ago
  cia.gov does not appear to be behind akamai or similar. Usually (always?), when a site is using akamai, a reverse DNS lookup for the site's IP yields some akamai domain name, rather than the original one. (This is the case for whitehouse.gov, for example.) This is /not/ the case for the CIA - they seem to do their own hosting. (root.ucia.gov and relay1.ucia.gov come up) So, it's plausible that the site is in fact run by a very small collection of servers, and that they were sitting ducks for the next red-bull-drinking teen wanting to "hack the CIA".

by goo 15y ago

Hilariously, the massive media frenzy surrounding the site outage will send the site enough traffic to DDOS it, even if LulzSec never meaningfully impacted it in the first place.

27182818284 15y ago

My first thought too. I immediately tried to load CIA and then thought, "Maybe they didn't hack it at all but just put out their Twitter message to drive traffic at it?" Or more interestingly, if they were in the process of hacking or something and wanted the cover of a torrent of strangers trying to reach their site.

AndyJPartridge 15y ago
I just happened to be looking at my Twitter feed the very moment they posted, and clicked the link immediately. No go. Would this effect happen so quick? I guess they do have a lot of followers, but I'd hope that even if all of them did what I did they could survive that amount of hits?
- madmaze 15y ago
  perhaps they were DDOSing it and brought it to a crawl, then all the other visitors streaming in would certainly give it the final blow
- madmaze 15y ago
  The other thing to keep in mind is that cia.gov is probably not made to handle lots of traffic, since I cant imagine them having a massive day-to-day userbase.. hence I assume it would be rather easy to get them choked up with traffic

mikey_p 15y ago

I doubt it, most of these sites tend to be behind Akamai or some sort of similar CDN/reverse proxy network. This actually serves two purposes: 1) provides some security by sufficiently isolating the actual system from public access (it can be locked down to only serve requests from the CDN) 2) Prevent the type of DDoS described in the parent comment. Akamai is designed to handle the load from things like the Grammies or Superbowl. For example, it's been documented that the White House uses Akamai extensively.

srl 15y ago
cia.gov does not appear to be behind akamai or similar. Usually (always?), when a site is using akamai, a reverse DNS lookup for the site's IP yields some akamai domain name, rather than the original one. (This is the case for whitehouse.gov, for example.) This is /not/ the case for the CIA - they seem to do their own hosting. (root.ucia.gov and relay1.ucia.gov come up) So, it's plausible that the site is in fact run by a very small collection of servers, and that they were sitting ducks for the next red-bull-drinking teen wanting to "hack the CIA".