On December 11th I posted my thoughts on the feared Colorado Weed Shortage, and I have a hunch that may have pissed off the script kiddie pothead “hackers”. On December 14th an influx of traffic started pouring in which was pretty hard to miss. Most blogs would love to have ten thousand or more visitors in AN ENTIRE MONTH. Eighty thousand in ONE DAY and you’d be running with the big boys with some serious revenue potential. Knowing that I wiped out years of ramblings on my site a year ago, and that I don’t post to, nor promote, the site very much, there’s absolutely no way I’d be seeing these sort of legitimate numbers.
By quickly looking, I knew this was (and still is) what is known as a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack). The gist being that the hackers take over a computer, install a script, and when they’re ready they pull the trigger to fire traffic at a specific website from the numerous computers they’ve infected.
Just this morning, looking at a ONE MINUTE snapshot, there were 214 hits to the home page from 171 different IP addresses (computers/websites/etc). And while your server-side firewall can throttle it a little, the most practical thing to do is just to wait out the attack as it would be quite expensive and time consuming to totally combat a DDoS attack, and regardless, it has yet to disrupt service (knock on wood), so why bother.
Luckily there really isn’t that much content on this site, otherwise they’d have easily knocked the entire server offline with the database queries and image requests alone. While 4 GIGs of bandwidth in a single day is huge for this site, it really isn’t that much data in the grand scheme of things compared to some of the other sites I manage.
I’ll refrain from boring you any further with the technical specifics and hope that the potheads smoke a little more so they forget what they’re up to. And I’m sending a note to Santa to make sure that they get coal, and a good spanking from grandma, for Christmas.
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