Do you _really_ think you have a "right" to run a dictionary attack from someone else's network? _Seriously?_
Personally - from looking at my fail2ban logs, I wish Amazon - and even more usefully, large residential cable/adsl providers - would implement this sort of pro-active monitoring of user/customer behavior.
What penalty do the people attacking my clients' WordPress sites or SSH ports deserve? Would that penalty change if they mailed Digital Ocean saying "No, it's OK - me attacking that website is part of my Uni assignment!"? Who'd be responsible for checking that claim, and how much time would it take? And remind me again how much you'd spent with Digital Ocean?
You fucked up big time - deal with it and learn from it. There's clearly a whole bunch of things you didn't even think about before doing this (ad that you're still whining about and failing to accept responsibility for). Be glad it bit you on the ass for something as unimportant as a uni assignment - imagine how much worse this could be if instead of a few assignment files, you'd lost 6 months of your startup's code - because you hadn't bothered reading the TOS you agreed to and didn't bother keeping off-site copies of important files.
Sorry this is harsh - but seriously, think about this from anybody else but your perspective. You behaved like a jerk, then tried the "But I didn't know! Sorry, I'll stop now." justification. And you're _still_ whining that you're being treated unfairly.
You violated their Terms, plain and simple. They don't owe you a second chance or your data.
As a side note, surely a CS major knows they should keep backups of every thing. Better yet, shove your text/code files into git and have backups AND versioning.
They told me that my files are safe at first. However they still deleted my account with all my files in it
If so, who complained to digitalocean?
If not, your professor should be fired, because the assignment encouraged students to break the law. Forget DigitalOcean's TOS. Attacking a server without permission is a crime.
No one complained to digital ocean. The digital ocean told me that they detected the attack by their router.
I am not attack any other servers. What I attacked is the specific virtual server hosted by university of waterloo itself.
Another thing is they should not say that the files are safe in first place, and then destroy them afterward. Maybe this user trust them and wait for the files to submit his assignment.
After running it two days, I receive an email saying their router find out that I was doing the DDOS and ask me to stop it. I stop the script immediately and reply them my reason telling them that I was doing it for University Assignment and I don't know that I was not allowed to do this. However, my account got suspends anyway. No matter how I send emails to beg them to give back my files in the server (I use the server for emacs and tmux to write codes for school projects), they just told me that sorry but my account is suspend. No matter how I beg them, all I received back from the email is just a max two line saying that my account is suspend. They do tell me that it suspends forever. After several days they deleted my account with all my files in it. Now I have no ways to get any of my files back! I feel ... so angry and hate so much about the digital ocean.
Is this how a normal American Company does? Will a normal American Company suspends customers account because that customer use it to do university work? I can understand it suspends me if I violate any laws but I was just doing an assignment and not violates anything. It also ignore the apology from the customer. Any evidence the customer provides is ignored gets well. Even that after couple days, digital ocean deleted that customer's account with all his files permanently!
This is my story. This is the reason why I hate Digital Ocean!!!!!!