> “These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC.”
> “Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos). These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC. While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these DDoS events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments. We have worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward.” [1]
Given that the FCC thinks "bulk commenting" via a spreadsheet is a proper solution to their website difficulties, I don't really believe in their ability to diagnose an issue as a DDoS. More likely, lots of people were trying to comment but couldn't.
[1] http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...
That would be a very incorrect usage of the term.
...That doesn't sound like "up and running."
- User tries to load the page to comment.
- High traffic. It fails.
- User reloads the page. It fails.
- "We're being hit by malicious requests that don't attempt to file comments!"
I'm probably not the only one who dropped-off after seeing all the form fields.
Hes an external actor (to the FCC system).. he wasn't attempting to comment himself, but his actions sent a large number of people to the FCC website.. too much for the host to handle, which made it difficult for commenters to access the site.
Fortunately so did her risk analysis skills. She noticed those numbers being bandied about by the Government prior, and decided she'd log on the very moment the census opened, because it was likely to fail under load.
This was no attack, this was legitimate public outrage.
1. The sheer volume of commenters and responses took down the system. They cover it by saying a DDoS attack was the cause. 2. They are intent on crippling Net Neutrality anyway, and either designed the system to insufficiently handle traffic and call it a DDos or even DDos themselves. 3. Since there are groups with vested interest in removing net neutrality, and they have deep pockets, I can easily see a few groups moving to protect their interests. In other words, a legitimate DDoS attack.
All 3 seem equally likely to me, especially considering Ajit Pai's stance on NN. This is not encouraging as a citizen of the US.