Hey there loyal readers. If you tried browsing our site yesterday evening you undoubtedly were met with a Page Not Found error for several hours. Thankfully everything is now ok and all is well on the internet again.
What happened exactly you ask? Our web host, Media Temple, was hit with a Distributed Denial of Service attack. What in the world is a DDoS? Well, I have decided to turn this lemon of a situation in to some lemonade and teach you a little bit about the internet using a situation we have all more or less been in. More after the jump.
IN YOUR WORLD – So there you are, Monday morning settling in at your desk enjoying a nice cup of coffee. Your creative director emails you and asks for a PDF of some comps you worked on for him. You email those over with little effort required, while you’re busy reading PUBLIC SCHOOL. Your girlfriend or boyfriend texts you shortly thereafter and you respond with ease. Someone in account services then gives you a shout and schedules a meeting with you for later in the afternoon.
All of these things happen in succession with a little bit of an overlap, but being the multitasking creative that you learned to be in college, you tackle these little tasks easily. What you don’t know though is that several of your clients, your mom back home in Dallas, your bladder, and a few people in the accounting department are all currently scheming to ruin your day.
Suddenly right around 11:45 you get a slew of emails from clients who all have to have final files ready for press by 12:30. You had no idea these requests were going to come in and had already planned a lunch at 12. You immediately get started prepping them all.
At 11:46 your mother calls saying that she volunteered you to design a baby shower invite for her neighbor’s daughter but forgot to tell you. The catch is that she needs it done by 12:30 as well so she can get them printed at Kinkos over her lunch break.
At 11:47 Carl from accounting calls you up to let you know that you didn’t correctly add up the hours that you worked on Insert Client Name Here project recently so will need to redo the paperwork before 12:30 or else he won’t be able to cut you a check on payday this Friday. Since you blew a bunch of money on that trip to Portland this weekend, you’re not ready to skip a week of pay. You think to yourself that you’re definitely overloaded with work now. It’s going to be tight getting out to lunch.
Of course, right on cue, your bladder lets you know that with all of the tension building, there isn’t time to fiddle faddle around, and you need to get to the bathroom.
Now given the circumstances and the number of things being thrown at you all at once, you’re struggling to figure out which to tackle . They are all of great importance to you (with the exception of maybe the baby shower invite, which is only important to your mom) so you’d like to get to them all. Given the small window of time you have to complete everything, your chances of knocking it all out is slim.
ON THE INTERNET – Websites work in a similar fashion to you, the worker bee. They are set up on a server, which is essentially a computer, who’s sole job is to serve the website to whoever asks for it. On a normal day, people access the website at normal levels and all is well in the world.
Sometimes though, malicious folks decide that they want to shut down a website for a period of time. It would be really difficult to take down a website by just hitting the refresh button on your web browser over and over, but if you could somehow do this to a website on many computers at once, you could accomplish just that.
A Distributed Denial of Service attack is when a malicious person or persons use thousands of computers to bombard a website with requests all at once. This is normally accomplished using some sort of maliciously installed software that is installed unknowingly on people’s computers. The Malware can then be used to essentially control the computer and utilize it in these types attacks. Since these computers are generally spread all over the world its a difficult thing to stop.
During one of these attacks, what happened to you right before lunch where seemingly everyone in your life contacted you with something they all considered urgent, happens to a web server. Thousands of computers are all asking things all at once. The server gets overloaded with requests and can’t keep up. Unable to keep up with the multitude of requests, the site goes down until the DDoS attack stops.
That’s essentially what happened to our server yesterday. You may ask what the point in knowing something like this is and why is it relevant. It’s relevant because increasingly, our world relies on the internet to function. When an attack like this happens it can take out even large hosts like Media Temple who serve over 10,000 websites. This one attack took all of them down. Essentially some pimple faced kid used his advanced computer skills to bring down over 10,000 websites. It may not seem like a big deal, but it is.
At the very least, use this as a reminder to get yourself some anti-virus software and stay away from downloading crap that you’re unfamiliar with. That way your computer won’t end up a zombie slave computer in the next DDoS attack that takes down ours or any other of your favorite websites.
If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this long article, keep in mind that The More You Know…
