> “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.