DDoS attack brings a brief outage to AfterDawn

A part of the AfterDawn network was unreachable for 1-2 hours this morning (around 10:00 AM Eastern Time, 15:00 GMT). The outage was caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack towards our servers that saturated the downlink of our rack cabinet.

Most of the English language sites were available again within an hour, but much of the international sites were unreachable for nearly two hours.

DDoS attack a considerable amount if traffic is directed at a server or servers in an attempt to bring down the server or the network infrasturcture. In our case the 1GBps network link of the rack cabinet couldn't handle all the incoming traffic. In response the traffic to the affected services was blackholed.

Graph of network traffic caused by a DDoS attack

The attack did not cause security issues with our services.

We would like to apologize for the inconvenience caused by the outage.

Jari Ketola
CTO, AfterDawn.com

Written by: Jari Ketola @ 11 Jan 2014 14:36

Mysttic

That's sad, why would anyone bother to DDOS this site?

11.1.2014 16:29 #1

lamain

was wondering the same thing.

11.1.2014 17:59 #2

Bozobub

Twelve-year-old script-kiddies need a reason..?

11.1.2014 19:41 #3

xboxdvl2

Originally posted by Mysttic: That's sad, why would anyone bother to DDOS this site? maybe there jealous we make more sense than they do.

custom built gaming pc from early 2010,ps2 with 15 games all original,ps3 500gbs with 5 games all original,yamaha amp and 5.1channel surround sound speakers,46inch sony lcd smart tv.

12.1.2014 07:19 #4

Ketola

The DDoS could have been just a random thing. Various IP addresses at Leaseweb, our ISP, are frequently targetted for DDoS. We haven't investigated the sources of the DDoS, and it probably wouldn't do much good in any case to do so.

Jari Ketola
Administrator
http://www.AfterDawn.com

13.1.2014 05:12 #5

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