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world over, was taken down on a Monday.

Amusingly enough, a search on the Stack Overflow site for DDoS-related topics turns up a page
in which a question asking for information on the best way to protect against DDoS attacks was
closed for being off-topic.

The only specifics released in regards to the attack have come from Stack Overflow’s site
reliability engineer Nick Craver, who reported that the site was receiving 40,000-50,000
requests per second for six plus hours.

The requests apparently came from a botnet made up of compromised webcams, CCTV and
DVRs – likely one of the absurdly sized IoT botnets currently dominating the DDoS landscape.

Craver indicated that neither he nor the rest of the Stack Overflow team would be forthcoming
with more information on the botnet behind the attack, stating that the secrecy was for the
greater good as some of the efforts being made to stop such botnets cannot be publicly
discussed for legal and privacy reasons.

Getting on-topic

It may have been off-topic for Stack Overflow, but it’s on-topic here: the best way to protect
against distributed denial of service attacks is by investing in professional DDoS mitigation.
Cloud-based protection provides scalable mitigation for websites and organizations of all sizes,
protecting effectively against network layer, application layer and protocol attacks by inspecting
traffic at a granular level in order to keep malicious traffic from reaching the protected website’s
network while allowing legitimate traffic through to the website uninhibited, even during an
attack.

As the high-profile attacks of the last six months have shown us, not only is there no shame in
needing professional DDoS protection, there might just be some shame in not having adequate
DDoS protection. Everyone is a target, no matter how unlikely it may seem.

About the Author

Anna Jones is an experienced freelance writer specializing in the latest cyber security trends
and news. She is keen to share her knowledge and expertise in the field and loves taking on a
writing challenge!

88 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – May 2017 Edition
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