I was recently the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) target of a
known Chinese botnet. Why some random Chinese botmaster decided to
target me, I have no clue. Fortunately, the attack didn’t really do any
damage because I use CloudFlare. Which is awesome (and free!). It
made it slightly more difficult for me to update my blog, and I ended
having to go into Wordpress though the frontend after tunneling to the
server over the Tor network. But, due to CloudFlare, my sight stayed
up throughout the entire attack, which lasted several days. Take that,
Chinese hackers!
I mostly wanted to say that I just tested a new web server stress
analyzer, called Hailstorm, made by some of my friends over at
Radical Designs. It’s basically a website (with a pretty UI!) that
you tell to go to your website, and it attempts to DDoS your website,
and then gives you a bunch of pretty graphs and charts on what happened.
I set the concurrent threads to their highest setting at 1000, and the
maximum requests to the highest setting at 5000. I gave Hailstorm the
highest bandwidth requests I could muster, like some of my music files
and artwork. My site didn’t flinch. Not one bit. I even Hailstormed this
site several times within a period of a few minutes. Nothing.
So, Hailstorm, you didn’t really tell me anything. You should allow your
maximum requests and concurrent thread settings to go way higher. I
guess if you did tell me anything, you told me that that Chinese botnet
was a giant scary monster of a botnet. Which told me, in turn, that
CloudFlare is an even more giant monster, albeit less scary. Thanks,
Hailstorm and CloudFlare, for teaching me things!
And, fuck you, Chinese botmaster.
