Posted on May 12, 2018 at 12:02 PM
A Crowdfunding Website Hit by a DDoS Attack
One of the crowdfunding initiatives suffered a DDoS attack. The campaign was run by Together for Yes, and the attack hit at 5:45 pm on May 9.
A recent development has seen a strong DDoS attack that hit a crowdfunding website used by a national civil society group Together for Yes. The site, which has CauseVox for a host, was attacked from Ireland, according to researchers who are looking into it.
Attempt to disrupt the crowdfunding campaign
The attack seems to have been powerful enough to bring down the host’s security completely, and the service was disrupted within seconds. The site was hit around 5:45 pm, which is usually when the amount of donations is the highest. The attack was followed by a complete shutdown of the website that lasted for about 30-45 minutes.
A spokesperson for Together for Yes, Sarah Monaghan, stated that the investigation of the incident is still ongoing and that various security experts are being contacted in order to discover the attack’s source. She added that the movement relies on the donations from its many members, however small they are. Because of it, this attack was seen as an attempt of undermining the movement’s advancement.
Amnesty International’s spokesperson also commented on the incident, stating that the platform has informed them of the attack which came from within Ireland and that the website was down for a certain amount of time. Besides the fact that this is a serious problem, it is also proof that there are some serious efforts to undermine the AI’s efforts. Additionally, the spokesperson also stated that CauseVox is a platform with a good reputation that took care of bringing the site back online as soon as it was possible. They have also taken steps to make sure that such incidents would not happen again.
The nature of DDoS attacks
The attack in question, as mentioned previously, was a DDoS attack. This is short for Distributed Denial of Service, and its goal is to make a website or a device that it is targeting completely unavailable.
Most of the time, when an attack like this is performed, a website’s server is bombarded with requests for data, and it receives too many of them to properly handle, which causes the site to crash. The same goes for a cloud database, with relatively similar consequences.
There are different levels of impact regarding the attack like this, and they can go from slight disruptions to a complete crash. This kind of an attack works on pretty much any kind of website, which means that every site on the internet is a potential target.
DDoS attacks are an old method of attacking websites, but that does not mean that they did not evolve in time, In the ’90s, such attacks bombarded websites with around 150 requests every second. However, the attacks these days can hit as hard as 1,000 Gbps.
Examples of such strong attacks are the Mirai botnet, as well as a recent hit on GitHub which was using an evolved method of attacking called memcaching.
