Bonum Certa Men Certa

DDOS and Migration (Updated)

Summary: Boycott Novell had been under DDOS attacks for almost 4 days. We were struggling to just stay online while hosts investigated where the attacks came from. We moved between hosts (to semi-dedicated) and the same pattern of attack persisted until yesterday.

WE have kept silent about it in order not to encourage the attacker/s, but it's true. We have been under heavy DDOS attacks since Thursday night. What has happened since then? Well, a lot. Our previous host is no more as far as we are concerned. After struggling with the botnet for like 10 hours (filtering to no avail) our Web site got isolated. It did not serve any pages for almost 2 days. A reader of Boycott Novell was kind enough to lend us room on his server (more or less dedicated), on which he fought the botnets for over a day. The attackers kept changing tactics. Some other readers offered filtering advice and we are grateful to all of them. Ultimately, the attacks halted yesterday afternoon.



“Ultimately, the attacks halted yesterday afternoon.”The migration from the old server was not simple because the site was disabled abruptly following the early attacks. But now we have ensured that all data has been migrated. The only 'good' thing which came out of this attack is that, as oiaohm put it, the ordeal sort of made us more robust to future attacks.

Now that we have a new host in place, we also have more features. Data on the site (comments, posts, etc.) was not lost in the migration, just heaps of time and effort affecting several people. We have moved to a bigger, more robust environment that will hopefully facilitate the needs of the Web site as it continues to grow (we served about 200GB of data last month). We apologise for the downtime, which is unprecedented.

The plan is to carry on exposing Comes exhibits next month and also organise the Wiki. There is enough for years of work.

Again: we would like to thank all those who helped during the downtime and especially our generous reader ( Copilotco) who offered to host the Web site, taking us away from shared hosting in the process. Dedicated servers on normal Web hosts are just far too expensive for us to afford and I swear that I never made a single dime from this Web site. The ads merely covered the hosting fees which Shane has been paying since 2006.

One last clarification for lunatics who are now suggesting that we DDOSed ourselves, where to even begin refuting such nonsense (coupled with personal abuse)?

The attacks came from many addresses, for example 88.198.60.8 which is "tor-proxy.va6.de". Multiple such IPs hit us constantly and relentlessly (all tor exit nodes at first). At one stage it seemed like the front page alone received 3 page requests per second. But the IPs were also doing a HEAD on the Web site as many times as possible, bringing the server down to its knees (both the old server and new server, the former running Red Hat and the latter CentOS).

Update: Here is a report from the administrator.

I took over hosting of boycottnovell.com for Roy in the middle of the DDOS attack. I am looking at the squid log for boycottnovell.com during the DDOS. I have squid caching/proxying/url-rewriting for apache for various reasons.

The attack initially (or at least, at the time the DNS was re-pointed to my server) consisted of lots of HEAD requests. Then I wrote up a script to tail the log finding anyone doing lots of HEAD requests and putting the offending IP into the iptables packet filter while I cooked up a more permanent solution. Eventually they figured this out and switched to a full on GET of the root of the site and then I think they started getting random pages from the site as fast as they could although I'm not sure about that.

The interesting part starts around timestamp 1242543590.804 which is apparently when most of the world's DNS cut over to me including that of the machines in whatever bot net was employed in the attack.

If we run this command on the logfile with the logfile being /tmp/bn.log:




grep " HEAD http://boycottnovell.com/ " /tmp/bn.log | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n | tail -10



we get:

   2716 81.175.61.4
   2960 212.24.147.228
   3056 204.209.56.56
   5637 87.236.199.73
   6645 145.100.100.190
   7261 212.42.236.140
   8487 88.198.14.120
   9640 62.141.58.13
  11008 87.118.104.203
  11269 88.198.60.8


and if we do:




grep " GET http://boycottnovell.com/ " /tmp/bn.log | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n|tail -10



we get:




5801 94.136.16.242 5854 85.25.152.185 5865 212.24.147.228 6367 66.35.1.170 6682 205.209.142.210 6977 87.118.104.203 8102 83.140.125.188 8300 85.25.145.98 8441 212.42.236.140 20065 66.230.230.230



So one IP did a get of the root of the site 20k times before I really effectively got everything blocked off and another did a HEAD around 11k times. You can get a feel for how the attack progressed using:




egrep ' GET http://boycottnovell.com/ | HEAD http://boycottnovell.com/ ' /tmp/bn.log | less



Assuming that everyone who did a GET or a HEAD more than 100 times (a conservative estimate) is involved in the attack:




egrep ' GET http://boycottnovell.com/ | HEAD http://boycottnovell.com/ ' /tmp/bn.log | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq -c| sort -n > /tmp/attackers



and then counting only the lines with greater than 100 hits we can see that there were 281 unique IP addresses involved in the attack.

However, it looks like they switched to targeting various different parts of the site later on or maybe just random pages because if we look at all of the accesses to the site which made more than 100 requests we get 863 IPs involved the top 19 being the following:




6193 62.141.53.224 7153 85.25.151.22 7764 145.100.100.190 8524 66.35.1.170 8757 94.136.16.242 9256 85.25.152.185 10369 83.140.125.188 10464 212.24.147.228 10874 205.209.142.210 10935 87.236.199.73 11441 88.198.14.120 12094 62.141.58.13 12208 88.198.60.8 12994 66.249.70.134 13940 85.25.145.98 19119 212.42.236.140 19867 87.118.104.203 26480 216.105.40.113 29854 66.230.230.230



So 66.230.230.230 made 29k requests to the site in total.

Putting some iptables rules in place (which I document here):

http://www.kernel-panic.org/pipermail/kplug-list/2009-May/108075.html

nicely cut the problem down to size and now the effect of the DOS is unnoticeable.

11M of gzipped log are used for this sample.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Traf-O-Data, the Company That Jeffrey Epstein's BFF (Bill Gates) (Co)Founded 53 Years and Went Out of Business Due to Heavy Losses
Who will die first, Bill or Microsoft?
A Note on SimilarWeb
Or why SimilarWeb is meaningless for more than 99% of the sites on the Web
IBM Said to be Shutting Down Offices or Sites in the United States
the press can no longer avoid admitting that IBM moves many jobs to India
LLM Slop as Attack Vector on the Reputation of Linux
The attacks on Linux have escalated to information warfare
 
Techrights Has Dealt With More Potent SLAPPs Than Violent Microsofters Begging to Hide What They Did to Women
I became accustomed to SLAPPs
Links 04/04/2025: Fury in South Korea, Flight MH370 Remains Mystery
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/04/2025: Anger and Raspberry Pi CM4
Links for the day
Links 04/04/2025: LLM Slop Bubble Bursting and Korea Music Copyright Association Bans Slop 'Music'
Links for the day
Why Microsoft's Shares Sank Almost 20% in Recent Months (the Bubble is Imploding)
verified press reports from the past 24 hours
GNU/Linux Rises to Almost 5% in Algeria While Windows Sinks to All-Time Low
GNU/Linux grew tenfold
Where to Get More Gags
A valued reader recommended that to us
Links 04/04/2025: Tech Stock (Inc. GAFAM) Fall, Google Pretends to Do End-to-End Encrypted Emails (With Google in Control)
Links for the day
To Participate in Fedora Diversity You Must Use Proprietary Software
Not for the first time either
Yandex About to Be Three Times Bigger Than Microsoft (Bing) in Asia
That's about 60% of the world's population
Gemini Links 04/04/2025: Decoupling Updates, Elaho as Gemini Client
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 03, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, April 03, 2025
Microsoft's Trouble in Africa and Asia
A new all-time high for GNU/Linux
Brett Wilson LLP Reported to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
The saddest thing in all this is that law firms can maintain high standards shall they wish to
Links 03/04/2025: Tariff Pains and C.D.C. Cuts
Links for the day
StatCounter: Microsoft is Masking a Disaster, It's Way Behind DeepSeek Already and Interest in LLMs Has Waned
it turns out the money "raised" for "Open" "AI" may not even exist at all
Links 03/04/2025: SoftBank Money for Microsoft "Open" "AI" Probably Doesn't Even Exist, Wikimedia Foundation Blasts LLM Nuisance While Microsoft Admits Demand Has Shrunk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/04/2025: Patch Panel and Pictures
Links for the day
Islamic Republic of Iran: GNU/Linux at All-time High This Month, Windows Falls to 12%
Vista 10 is up this month despite being "end of life" (EoL) soon
Indonesia: All-Time Highs for GNU/Linux
What's noteworthy right now is the growth of GNU/Linux
statCounter Says GNU/Linux Usage is Up Again (Internationally)
some preliminary April data
Only on April 1st Can the Free Software Foundation Associate With Microsoft's Open Source Initiative (OSI)
We saw some pranks that day linking the FSF to Microsoft (e.g. "endorsing" Windows)
Confirmed in the Mainstream Media: A Lot of Microsoft "Workloads" Were Just LLM Slop (Helping to Fake Growth for Years, as Microsoft Had Paid "Open" "AI" to Become a "Client") and Demand is Rapidly Waning, Datacentres Canceled and/or Shut Down
Anything to facilitate further accounting fraud
Taiwan's Media Covers Closure of Microsoft's "AI" Lab, It's Time to Talk About the Gradual Death of Windows and Implosion of the "AI" Bubble
Earlier this week we showed that mostly Asian media had the 'nerve' to mention Microsoft silently shutting down its 'AI' lab
IBM Gets Rid of Kelly Chambliss as Mass Layoffs Reported in IBM Consulting, IBM Loses Key Contracts/Graft
IBM Consulting has been in disarray lately
More Gains for GNU/Linux, Based on Web Surveys
the Steam site shows rapid growth for "Linux" this month
Slopwatch: Anti-Linux Articles, Not Even Written by Humans
Why aren't Web sites more vocal about this problem?
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, April 02, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, April 02, 2025
Links 03/04/2025: Apple Fined Over Secret Surveillance, "Elegant Writer For A More Civilized Age"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 02/04/2025: Books and Cold Tea
Links for the day
Links 02/04/2025: More Layoffs, Nokia Again Takes Advantage of Illegal and Unconstitutional Patent Court With Nokia Staff as 'Judges'
Links for the day
Links 02/04/2025: Seizures and Returns to Windows of 24 Years Ago
Links for the day
LLM Slop Helps Obscure and Distort News About Layoffs (IBM, GAFAM)
It's hard to find accurate information
Links 02/04/2025: Microsoft Developers Are Threatening to Go on Strike, World Backup Day Noted
Links for the day
Gemini Protocol Has Growing Appeal (the Web Got Too Bloated and Full of LLM Slop)
For any "data plan" with bandwidth limits or "tiers" it would be cheaper to use/browse Geminispace
The Web Can Survive LLM Slop, But Only If We Collectively Shun and Discourage Serial Sloppers
Doing nothing ought not be a possibility
Amid Secret Shut-downs and Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (4 Waves of Layoffs in 3 Months of 2025) Some Microsoft Staff Expected to Go On Strike
workers going on strike
Gemini Links 02/04/2025: No more on Mastodon and Gemini Mention Script in Go
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, April 01, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, April 01, 2025
My Motion Disbarring or “Striking Off” Brett Wilson LLP for Enabling Violent Americans Who Try to Crush Microsoft Critics in the United Kingdom by Multiple SLAPPs
"Guns for hire" (for Microsoft people who received Microsoft salaries)
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Hijacked Again by Patent Litigation Industry, as President Cheeto Prioritises Aggressors
The "mafia" has taken over the "industry" and the Federal system (justice and constitutions trampled upon)
Ubuntu Slop and FUD Manufactured With LLMs and Funded (by Oneself) 'Studies'
Slop and FUD are ruining the Web