• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Blog Archive
  • Contact
  • Mailing List

The Musings of Brian Groce

  • Anthology
    • Animals
    • Business
    • Current Events
    • Entertainment
    • Food & Drink
      • Recipes
        • Cocktails
    • Games
    • Geek Stuff
    • History
    • In The Yard
      • Garden
    • Movies
    • Odd News
    • Really?!
    • Sports
    • Travel
  • Debris
    • Asides
  • Photos
  • Podcasts and Videos
  • Reviews and Thoughts
    • Books
    • Collectibles
    • Fashion
    • Food & Drink
    • Games
    • Lifestyle
    • Tech

Pissing off the Potheads (a DDoS attack)

December 23, 2013 by Brian Groce Leave a Comment

pothead-ddos

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.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: Blog Traffic, Colorado Weed Shortage, DDoS, DDoS Attack, Hackers, Potheads, Script Kiddies, Web Traffic

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

2023 Holiday Gift Guide

SUBSCRIBE

Signup for updates and cool stuff!

Thank you!

You have successfully joined our subscriber list.

.

More Musings

9 Indiana Children Have Died From COVID-19

August 10, 2021 By Brian Groce

CDC: 349 Children Have Died from COVID-19 in the U.S.A.

August 9, 2021 By Brian Groce

Comic Book Releases for August 4, 2021

August 5, 2021 By Brian Groce

Footer

7950 Southeastern Ave. #39178
Indianapolis, Indiana 46239

Copyright © 2012-2023 Brian Groce & Naptown Buzz LLC • Designed by Watershed Studio LLC