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Why is Lemmy World down?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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What's DDOS?
DDOS = denial of service attack. Attacker sends a bunch of requests overloading a service and causing other clients to experience.timeouts due to the service not being.abe.to.handle the load.
It's like a group of people standing in line for the cashier and they each buy a single peanut with cash and have a question to the manager.
I like that picture, it makes it easier to understand for people who aren't that much into computers.
And now you can use that picture to even extend it with: We're currently enjoying our checkout at different registers, where there's not peanut nutjobs at the register. I like it too.
Distributed denial of service.
That first D is the one that makes the attack a real problem.
Yep, this is key. If you’re getting a bunch of malicious traffic from one source, that’s easily fixed. Just drop the traffic.
But when that traffic is coming from hundreds or thousands of sources, that becomes much harder to address. Can you just drop traffic from those sources? Sure! But then you also risk dropping legitimate traffic.
There are also services that can automate the detection and prevention of DDOS attacks such as CloudFlare and Akamai, but these can get expensive very quickly, so it can significantly increase the cost to running the instance in question.
I honestly forgot what the first D was at that moment lol. While I agree it technically can be done pretty badly without distributed attacks. I read in the past couple of years of an approach attackers used was to make an application DOS itself from a single request. I think it required a vulnerability in the application in this instance though.
Twitter did this recently lol