OVER the past few days, on at least 3 different occasions and for periods as long as an hour (due to mitigation, which discourages the attacker), we came under DDoS attacks. It's impossible to mistake this for anything else; the patterns give away the intent, complete with test runs, attempts to bypass protections and so on.

"Whoever tries to forcibly silence us is clearly wasting his/her time."The first very major attack we suffered was in 2008. It was a DDoS attack so large that it left us offline for several days. It was very persistent. Back in 2014 and in 2015 when we started covering EPO scandals we also routinely suffered DDoS attacked (around the time Benoît Battistelli blocked this site -- a block that the 'kind' and 'gentle' and 'different' António Campinos maintains after 2 years in the Office).

It's difficult to tell who may be behind these latest attacks. It might not matter, either. What matters is that now, in 2020 (and also last year), we're far better equipped to deal with such attacks. They're not so potent. They may cause the site to slow down for a few minutes (depending on volume/load), but the site is monitored closely and has mechanisms for prompt mitigation. Whoever tries to forcibly silence us is clearly wasting his/her time. It hardly wastes our time because we have trivial responses which only take a minute or two to activate, without ever relying on anything external like third parties or CDNs such as ClownFlare or 'elastic' AmaZone. To hell with those companies trying to suck in all the world's Internet traffic. ⬆