Re:What's up with HN?
by borlak on Monday March 11, 2013 @11:25PM
(#5359912)
A DDOS of HN is quite strange indeed. There should be some kind of ransom involved, but seeing as HN doesn't make money (I assume) from these forums, there is nothing to ransom.
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Re:What's up with HN?
by redthrowaway on Monday March 11, 2013 @11:36PM
(#5359960)
Why would it have to be for gain? I bet there's plenty of bored people with idle small- to medium-sized botnets who'd take down a somewhat popular site just for lulz.
For the people doing it, the gain can be about trying out their skills, not being bored, and getting the bragging rights of having DDoSed "Hacker" News.
Re:What's up with HN?
by gingerlime on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @04:53AM
(#5360855)
So if they then brag about it and it get posted on HN, should it get upvoted? (not a rhetorical or cynical question, I'm really curious)
I'd upvote it if it was interested and they talked about how they did it (and it didn't involve LOIC).
Which is to say the blog post about it probably wouldn't be worth reading :)
I'm inclined to suspect HN's design actually makes it fairly easy to DoS.
How come? Can you explain your point a bit further?
Sure. I didn't want to put a how-to manual in this thread on the day of the attack though.
HN has a big table of closures representing actions a user can take. Loading certain pages, such as the reply link on a comment creates more of them. They time out after a while, which will get you "unknown or expired link". Intentionally creating a few million of them ought to fill up the server's memory and would be a more effective way to to impair the server's functionality than simply requesting the home page a few billion times.
Someone upset that they were rejected from YC?
HN is a significant asset for YCombinator, and YC, presumably, makes significant money.
Who would you DDOS if you wanted to see if your botnet works?