I know this isn’t the kind of news Linux fans were hoping to read on Christmas Day, but unfortunately, on a day meant for faith, kindness, and hope, others are choosing to act in exactly the opposite way.
Many of you probably remember the problems Arch faced just a few months ago due to massive DDoS attacks, which mainly affected the AUR. Sadly, just when it seemed those issues were behind, a new large-scale DDoS attack on Christmas Day once again made the distribution’s website effectively inaccessible.
I had a ddos in 01, took the entire cluster down for a fairly popular website.
Traffic distribution was very wide; everything was on port 80.
All the traffic would come in, smack the front page, then disappear.
Turns out marketing had purchased an ad on MSN which was a hot search engine at the time, we were supposed to be the top link for any search with “school, education, classes, tutoring”. MSN accidentally made us the top link for EVERY search term. My T1 and my BGP frame connection were balls to the wall for 3 days.
OBV, this isn’t marketing, but they’re not a great target. No one’s getting any money from it, They don’t have any stiff corporate competition.