16 ms·
This is what a DDoS attack looks like
- xfs 13y agoHow does DDoS mitigation look like? Do they use realtime dashboard with similar visualization to cut off hotspots?
- WestCoastJustin 13y agoIn my experience it is fairly manual. Here it is at a very high level. First you want to determine if this is really a DDoS or legitimate traffic. You might be notified via downtime, alerts of load, in this instance, I suspect; download graphs, log analytic (if using a cdn which can handle the load, then you might not notice for a while i.e. eye popping bill). Narrowing down the attack profile means looking at logs. Be that network flow data (very helpful) or in this instance web server logs. Probably something like: totals grouped by ip, destination url, etc to see if there are any spikes. Also, managing stress. If you are some type of retailer then you likely are losing money, people are asking for updates, etc. This can be extremely stressful.
- etix 13y agoWe use Munin for the graphs and Nagios for the alerts. The mitigation of the DDoS is done manually since we need to identify the patterns and block them.
- eterps 13y agohttps://code.google.com/p/logstalgia/ https://code.google.com/p/logstalgia/
- BaconJuice 13y agoThank you.
- 11031a 13y agoawesome find. thanks
- rozap 13y agoThis has pretty limited use, but holy shit is it awesome. Thanks!
- onemorepassword 13y agoLimited use? As someone who over the past decade regularly had to sell higher management on investing in infrastructure, I can tell you this will be extremely useful. Seriously, even if it's just a random visualization of some normal peek traffic, it will go down easier than dozens of actual arguments, slideshows with bullet points or fat reports nobody reads. Show the video, do a bit of handwaving and there's your budget... For any techie trying to convince their boss they need more servers, this is a very powerful tool. Use with caution.
- rozap 13y agoSo I installed the project and ran it with my log files and I'd like to retract my previous claim of it not being useful. You're right, I can definitely see the use here, it puts stuff into perpective quite well. It's easy to write off shiny visualizations as silly (which is what I did above) but they definitely offer a perpective that you can't get any other way.
- est 13y agoDamn that's impressive. Someone please port a realtime WebGL version!
- scoot 13y agoIf you like logstalgia, you'll love gource[1] which visualises source control change history. It's also available as a brew recipe on the Mac for easy-peasy install. [1] https://code.google.com/p/gource/ https://code.google.com/p/gource/
- Kekeli 13y agoLove this
- clone1018 13y agoI actually have Logstalgia running with my primary server for Minotar, and at 4,000 requests per second this is normally what it looks like. Awesome program!
- Thaxll 13y agoWhat kind of person would DDoS a video player website?
- stackcollision 13y agoThe same kind of person who would steal books from a library, or talk in a movie theater.
- buro9 13y agoMaybe Videolan isn't the target and the DDoS is against someone else in the form of using Videolan's bandwidth against someone else? That's my general assumption of any attack in which the response to a request is in the many MB range and the request is in the bytes range. That someone with limited bandwidth and many connections is attempting to acquire a large amount of bandwidth to attack someone else.
- skorgu 13y agoHTTP is over tcp though so it should be Hard to convince vlc's servers to reply to a third party. Seems like a silly ddos actually but what do I know.
- JoshTriplett 13y agoGood thought, but source spoofing for an amplification attack wouldn't work here; from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5613529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5613529 : > The actual number of requests was not that high (400 req/s), but the botnet was downloading the whole vlc.exe, aka 22MB. So, we were at around 70Gbps during the night, in average. Source spoofing would not allow downloading the whole file; the spoofed source address would get the first response packet and send an RST ("stop, no connection associated with this packet, go away") long before that point.
- eterm 13y agoFantastic! I had read about such a log visualisation tool a long time ago (I'm not sure but I think I read it about it via NTK which should date it) but I had lost any knowledge of what it might be until now. Now I can see such a tool and it looks wonderful. (More on topic, DDOS is beautiful!)
- negativity 13y agoI'd be willing to go out on a limb and estimate that maybe some private interests in Hollywood, with certain four letter acronyms, despise open source media player projects like VLC, since they might represent a channel that can potentially enable bypasses that can circumvent precious, precious DRM. The perception being: if you can see the source of a media player program, the encryption might be implicitly compromised. This is a silly idea though, because it neglects certain realities about the very nature of electronic encryption, and media consumption. Maybe having source code lowers the bar in some respects, but the reality is that determined people will simply bootleg media anyway, by other means. Not an accusation though, just that my tinfoil hat is tingling. Who else might be so motivated to attack an awesome software project like VLC?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- omni 13y agoCool / "good" projects get attacked all the time. I suspect this is because the attacker is guaranteed an audience on HN to marvel in the results of their work. I think this is probably simpler and more likely than the tinfoil hat theory.
- pavel_lishin 13y ago> Who else might be so motivated to attack an awesome software project like VLC? Anyone who wants to show off a proof-of-concept attack to potential customers, without stepping on any huge toes. (e.g., it's relatively safe to DDoS VLC, not so much a U.S. government agency or a huge multi-national company.)
- AUmrysh 13y agoI could see it being some sort of message as CISPA was stalled in the Senate yesterday. More likely, however, is that we'll never know why.
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoI would suspect DDoS attacks to be akin to terrorist attacks in that somebody typically claims responsibility for them.
- jbk 13y agoDisclaimer: VideoLAN president and lead VLC developer here. The attack started on our new mirroring system (powered by mirrorbrain) 2.5 days ago, during the night (after 2am, so we were sleeping). We were woken up (OP and I) in the morning by many mirrors complaining of high bandwidth use. The actual number of requests was not that high (400 req/s), but the botnet was downloading the whole vlc.exe, aka 22MB. So, we were at around 70Gbps during the night, in average. Afterwards, North America got up, and things got worse. We had up to 1660 req/s, so around 292 Gbps... This is very weird for a DDoS, to be honest. Our front machine that splits the down mirrors was taking most of the load, and we were able to find the patterns to drop the botnet connexions, in order to not kill too much our mirrors. I won't discuss too much of the patterns, as you can imagine, but as usual, I'll be happy to discuss it IRL or by mail. Tweaking the front server was also important to reduce the number of open connexions, to not kill our server. 2.5 days after, the attack is still going on, with an average of 500req/s. The video was done using logstalgia, using scripts of OP, on my machine (<troll>he was running eclipse, he couldn't do both at the same time :)</troll>).
- subsystem 13y ago"This is very weird for a DDoS, to be honest." Maybe it was aimed at bandwidth costs?
- jbk 13y agoMaybe. Seriously, no idea.
- drivebyacct2 13y agoThat's precisely what I don't get in this case, especially. The source is out there, there are other people mirroring vlc. So if you're trying to censor it, you're going to fail pretty hard. In the absence of that, what can it be? Of course! It must be the mplayer folks!!
- kin3tic 13y agoOr in this case, who you'd literally least suspect: wmplayer. All hail wmv!
- bentaber 13y agoIs each request a unique IP or do you see frequent and recurring requests from a chunk of IPs?
- etix 13y agoDepends, I would say half of them are returning every once in a while and others only do a single request and never come back. No clear pattern here.
- aidenn0 13y agoIt it possible this is an accidental DDoS? VLC is popular to bundle with things, and all it would take is the code that checks for a new version and automatically downloads to have a bug that it always thinks there's a new version...
- dave809 13y agoUbuntu 13.04 came out yesterday, the people upgrading might be reinstalling all there programs
- jbk 13y agoThis is impossible, seriously. I cannot share the details, but the HTTP headers shows clearly that this is not that case. And more than 10 millions downloads per day?
- mortenlarsen 13y agoUbuntu downloads from it's own mirrors (hundreds of them), with very few exceptions for proprietary stuff that can't be distributed like Adobe Flash and ttf-mscorefonts-installer (not default). Also it would not download a .exe to install VLC.
- fsckin 13y agoPretty cool stuff! glTail [0] does similar visual analysis of pretty much anything. [0] http://www.fudgie.org/ http://www.fudgie.org/
- fudge 13y agoI currently have a native OSX version og glTail in review by Apple, which is quite a bit faster and easier to install than the Ruby version. I also have an updated IOS version in the queue which doesn't crash quite as often.
- fsckin 13y agoAn IOS version? How cool! I'll check it out, thanks for the heads up.
- dfc 13y agoI was browsing HN on a friend's computer that without adblock and clicked this link. Wow! Is this what the internet looks like without adblock? The ad/content ratio is crazy...
- Tobu 13y agoWithout blogspam: https://youtu.be/hNjdBSoIa8k https://youtu.be/hNjdBSoIa8k Also follow the submitter link, currently etix seems to be most active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/etixxx https://twitter.com/etixxx
- x0054 13y agoPerhaps it's worth it to code a quick and dirty solution using JavaScript encryption. On your download page setup a script that would receive a given encrypted string, decrypt it with a provided key, and the use it to prepend to the download link. On the server, symbolically link the file on demand and send it to only one user, ip limited. This way the attack, though still can be automated, would require some code rewrite from that attacker, which might be beyond his/her abilities. Also, if the encryption algorithm is CPU intensive, then it wold require several seconds of CPU time per request from the attacker. To make the decryption CPU intensive you may simply use any encryption algorithm you like, many are available as JS libraries, but instead of giving the entire decrypt key, skip the last 2 digits, and let the end user brut force the last 2 digits in the client via JS. That way there is a computational cost to each attack request. Just some ideas off the top of my head. Not sure at the moment how to implement the server side part at the moment, but I am guessing that their are server side rules that allow you to easily set per ip access restrictions to folders or fils. PS: please excuse spelling, typing this on my iPhone.
- looneylv 13y agoI guess someone took some VLC crash seriousley to the heart.... :D Hang on guys!
- verandaguy 13y agoThe VLC logo is a traffic cone. That visualization sort of looks like a cone. Coincidence?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- onemorepassword 13y agoAll I could think of was "this is what a DDoS attack will look like in Hollywood products for the next decade". Awesome visualization.
- superflit 13y agoI just got one of my servers attacking TicketMaster by a faulty cgi. (my alert system notified 5 minutes after it started) The mob is angry now It was disabled.. I think it has more targets that only vlc...
- ck2 13y agoBrave of them to disclose it's just the user-agent they are filtering. It's not possible to inspect the user-agent via the linux firewall (iptables) is it? I guess you can use this if your iptables supports string matching --string "useragent"