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My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack
- ro_bit 2y agoSo that's why they want us to microchip our pets!
- peterburkimsher 2y agoSo they can connect to CAT-6 Ethernet.
- swampthinker 2y agoAnd here I thought your somehow hooked up a cat feeder to alerts. Regardless, very cute - what’s your cat’s name?
- 867-5309 2y agoproposing Danielle of Purrvice
- chris_wot 2y agoFunny, that's how the very first customer realised that the Australian telco Optus was down. The wireless cat feeder relied on the Internet and when no food appeared, the cat decided to complain to management.
- dguo 2y agoWriting this post did make me think that if someone had a well-trained dog, they could hook up a monitoring service to something that makes a particular sound, which tells the dog to alert the person. Her name was (I sadly lost her to cancer) Bamboo! Because one of the first things she did after I adopted her was to try to eat my bamboo plant.
- codetrotter 2y agoAnd as an added bonus, we could get that dog classified as a service dog :D “Sir you need to leave that mutt outside!” “He’s a service dog” “Why? You don’t look like you have any disabilities” “Wow. First of all – rude! Second, yeah you are right I don’t but you see he’s my DDoS dog and I need him with me at all times to protect the company servers”
- mmahemoff 2y agoI thought it was going to be a home server that went into overdrive, heating the room your cat was in or knocking out the aircon. Anyway, better experience than being woken up by a dozen SMS alerts.
- jart 2y agoIt's so easy to crush ddos with token buckets that usually the only thing I need my cat to wake me for is when my Discord gets raided.
- avg_dev 2y agonever heard of this before. I looked it up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_bucket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_bucket I think this would be like a firewall or ingress thing that would drop packets that resulted in excess load before they make it to the application server.
- jart 2y agoHere's the code I use: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/net/http/tokenbucket.c https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/net/http/to...
- sakopov 2y agoIt's a common rate limiting algorithm. Here's an interesting article from Stripe on how they use it in their APIs. [1] [1] https://stripe.com/blog/rate-limiters https://stripe.com/blog/rate-limiters
- hnlmorg 2y agosome types of DDoS. ;) You could still overload the service with a sufficiently large attack in either volume of connection requests or number of unique IP addresses. Token buckets are usually part of an overall resilience strategy rather than a silver bullet to solve all denial of service concerns.
- jameshart 2y agoAs always it’s easy to overlook the insider threat. Grammatically dubious extortion emai? Bitcoin ransom? Did it not occur to you that the cat was the one behind the attack?
- ordu 2y agoYeah, cats are notoriously bad at grammar.
- smarks 2y agoI CAN HAZ DOS ATTAK
- addicted 2y agoYou do know that’s just to throw humans off their scent right? Everyone believes they have bad grammar so when they launch the really serious attacks we all think it was a state agency rather than the cats.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoYou mean to say that a Nigerian prince is responsible for the xz backdoor?
- shawn_w 2y agoThe call is coming from inside the house!
- jvm___ 2y agoThe meow is coming from inside the house
- Mawr 2y agohttps://xkcd.com/1530/ https://xkcd.com/1530/
- nusl 2y ago
- cocoa19 2y agoAnd I often wonder if on call is justifiable “because you make more money than most professionals”.
- tossandthrow 2y agoas with most roles, I think it is negotiable. You have your professional leverage, expected pay and grit. you need to balance these things. Also, if you can get an equivalent role with less requirements such as being on call, then I guess it is just a question of grabbing it!
- hughesjj 2y agoI mean, you have oncall, it's just permanent oncall.
- krab 2y agoNot really. If I don't agree to on-call, I do it on best-effort basis. That is: "Oh, I'm camping with kids without a computer. I'll try to help you as much as I can. Did you try Z after X and Y didn't work? Ok, try it and call me back how it went, I'll try to Google something in the meantime." If that would happen too often (more than 1-2x a year), I would try to improve the process or consider switching my job. And my phone is silent during the night. I wouldn't call this a permanent on-call, just being responsive.
- willsmith72 2y ago2 European teams I worked on paid a bonus for on-call duty, and the systems were so stable that enough people volunteered for the few who didn't want it, weren't forced to. It was pretty great, I took a week shift every month or so except when I was going on holiday, and aside from lugging a backpack with my laptop everywhere, didn't affect my life at all except 1 or 2 minor issues
- krab 2y agoYou usually get some extra money for the duty. And if you get woken up, the hours you spend are counted towards your normal working hours - so you aren't expected to show up in the morning after putting out a fire. Or you get some more bonus (like 2x hourly pay for the night work). That's about the balance when people are ok doing it. But it depends on stability of your service. If it is messed up and people are woken up often, then you won't find many volunteers if they have other choice.
- Denvercoder9 2y ago> we didn’t have a formal on-call rotation yet. That was a deliberate decision, since being on-call is painful, and the team was good about just collectively keeping an eye out for urgent alerts. That seems like a terrible solution. Yeah, being on-call is painful, but at least I know beforehand when I'll be on-call and get compensated for it. Always being expected to keep an eye out for urgent alerts just sucks all around.
- bongodongobob 2y agoYeah that sounds like on call all the time, that makes no sense.
- dguo 2y agoI know it sounds bad, but in practice, it really did work fine for us for quite a while. 1. We didn't experience that many incidents that couldn't wait until working hours. 2. There was never an explicit expectation to keep an eye out. We did it anyway because we were at an early-stage startup, and we all deeply cared about making our products work for our customers.
- krab 2y agoI know this from a few startups and it really is not that bad. You really triage what should wake you up and what's ok until morning. It works well as long as the technical founder is ok playing a goalie and essentially being always on call (even though others catch a lot of alarms). It stops working when the company grows and no one understands the whole system and you need on-calls from several teams. Then the company does some formal on call rotation and it's fine again. It hurts during the transition only.
- dguo 2y agoGood point about the technical founder. That was certainly the case for us, as our CTO handled many issues himself.
- lmm 2y agoMaybe the phone was silent but still flashing a screen? Mine does that in that mode. At my first job we had a guy who could spot incidents coming on the monitoring dashboard before they happened. He never managed to explain or even understand what he was looking for and no-one else picked it up, but he would just see something that made him say things were odd, and most of the time we'd get an alert shortly after.
- seanthemon 2y agoWe call those guys the canaries and we keep them deep in the mineshaft
- Waterluvian 2y agoMake or get a human to stare at streams long enough and they’ll attune to the patterns. We’re wired for patterns. It doesn’t even have to be conscious and explainable. The signals just suddenly aren’t right.
- zmgsabst 2y agoThe perennial example being lab techs/equipment operators and machine hum.
- brookst 2y agoMy s/o is convinced she has a tell when we play rock / paper / scissors, and maybe she does, but if so I don’t know it. I just know that if I observe her closely and don’t make a conscious decision about what to throw, I win 80% of the time. Somewhere deep in my brain, there are neurons that developed for some more evolutionarily-relevant purpose and which are now a little disgusted with how they’re being used.
- theshrike79 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microexpression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microexpression might be one explanation. You can somehow subconsciously detect those in your SO without doing it on purpose.
- ahmedfromtunis 2y ago> With horrible grammar Ah, the days before ChatGPT! On a more serious note, do you think there will ever be a way to stop ddos attacks once and for all? While all threats are bad, ddos is the most lame type of attacks there is; no special skill or knowledge are needed, just load a script or, heck, pay someone who'll execute it for you as a service.
- flafla2 2y agoCloudflare does a pretty good job of managing it, at the cost of some centralization. It would be pretty cool if there was a way to DDOS-harden at the protocol layer. Not sure if that’s even possible though
- bee_rider 2y agoMaybe if the network was much more distributed and lower bandwidth? If most of your customers are in Mexico, Canada is DDoSing you, and the pipes between you and Canada start filling up as a result that isn’t a big problem, right? As long as consumer routers on you/Mexico’s side of the Canadian clog don’t decide to help out.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoIt's not as simple as "loading a script" - IP addresses (or in the case of IPv6, subnets) are (for the average person) a limited resource, as is bandwidth, and most amplification attacks require IP spoofing which is not possible from most connections. If it's a volumetric attack, the side with more bandwidth wins (the attacker may be able to amplify here). If it's a load-based/application-level attack, blocking the attacker IPs at the firewall level solves it. This was application level, not (purely) volumetric, since they already had a WAF/Cloudfront. Identifying attacker IPs to block is a matter of correctly attributing cost to a source IP, correctly attributing benefit (i.e. legit user activity) to a source IP, then blocking the IPs or ranges where the cost significantly exceeds the benefit you see from that IP or range. That's easier said than done, since cost can come in many forms (e.g. open connections clogging up memory, TLS handshakes, requests that are expensive to parse for your web server, requests that trigger expensive database queries, in/out bandwidth, ...) which is why most just slap Cloudflare (or here, Cloudfront) in front of it and work around with manual rules like in this example.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoIs this an ad for AWS?
- fragmede 2y agoKinda reads like one, but if he was on GCP and used their ddos shield then it'd read like an ad for their service instead. Would be better if he'd been a bit more abstract and said cloud provider instead of naming AWS.
- xeromal 2y agoTech forum Talks about useful tech "iS tHiS An aStroTurFing Ad"
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoThe entire article was "I have all these problems, and I use one small trick (aws product) to fix it all!" It does +1 most of those types of spam farms with a bit more technical discussion, but not really that much.
- avg_dev 2y ago> But in 9 years, that was the only time she did it while I was sleeping. ... that you know of
- csin 2y agohttps://np.reddit.com/r/AnimalsBeingJerks/comments/cgkiif/i_was_having_trouble_breathing_at_night_so_i/ https://np.reddit.com/r/AnimalsBeingJerks/comments/cgkiif/i_...
- ed_mercer 2y ago> We didn’t reply, though in retrospect, it could have been fun to try to troll them. Not replying is the only valid answer. Trolling them could potentially put you more on their radar and get targeted for other attacks. And for what?
- fragmede 2y agoThe princely sum of $5,000. We got that at my employer back in 2016. We got hit by a ddos, and decided to ignore it, though we did dig up some BTC just in case. We enacted a bunch of DDoS protection as a result, costing way more than $5,000, but not paying money to extortionists is worth every penny.
- vsnf 2y agoThe problem with paying extortion or ransoms is that you incentivize the attacker to come back and do it again. It may have been $5k to pay off one attacker and more than that to build the defense, but now you have defenses and are less likely to suffer attackers in the future. And as you say, not paying money to criminals is inherently worthwhile.
- aleksiy123 2y agoOn the other hand the attacker may actually have incentive to follow through and hold up their end so as to build a reputation. Making their next victims more likely to just pay. Somewhere I read that some ransomware had excellent "customer" service for helping you transfer over the payment and promptly restore your files.
- soraminazuki 2y agoScammers acting like an adult is hard to believe. They’re usually quick to start yelling and cursing in Kitboga videos.
- dhosek 2y agoThe serious organized crime outfits are very organized. They’ll provide customer support to walk you through purchasing and transferring the bitcoin.
- sedatk 2y ago“Ransomware Reality Shock: 92% Who Pay Don’t Get Their Data Back” https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2021/05/02/ransomware-reality-shock-92-who-pay-dont-get-their-data-back/?sh=679851dce0c7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2021/05/02/ransomwa...
- EveryPizza 2y agoQuite some time ago, someone from my family was alerted by their cat when the dishwasher was leaking. Their conclusion was that the cat was either trying to save them or the cat was trying to kill them.
- readyplayernull 2y ago> the cat was either trying to save them or the cat was trying to kill them. An inverted Schrödinger cat.
- macintux 2y agoOne of my all-time favorite novels, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, includes an anecdote: a crow's call wakes up someone who's sleeping outdoors, just as a large cat (a tiger, perhaps) is sneaking up on him. One character suggests the crow was trying to warn the man. Another posits the bird was bringing the sleeper to the tiger's attention so it could enjoy the scraps after the meal.
- derefr 2y agoOdd that the most obvious hypothesis wasn't given: the crow was probably using its alarm call to warn other crows. Crows are social animals, who care about the fates of their "friends and acquaintances" — so they would do that. But also, on a tangent, there is a bird that does this kind of non-conspecific alarm calling the time as part of its food-gathering strategy: the African fork-tailed drongo. The drongo gives true alarm calls to food-rival species nearby, to tell them when it has spotted a mutual predator. This leads to these food-rival species coming to rely on these signals. But then, every once in a while, it gives a false alarm, to get the food-rivals to run away for a bit, so it can nab the bugs/berries/etc that the rival would have been eating.
- hiddencost 2y agoIt's called an allegory
- 2y ago
- fuzztester 2y agocattackstic! cattackstrophic!
- retreatguru 2y agoReminds me of this book: Dogs that Know When their Owners are Coming Home https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/dogs-that-know-when-their-owners-are-coming-home https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/dogs-tha...
- exabrial 2y agoWe don’t have very many earthquakes in Kansas… but I remember the first/only one I felt. I was sound asleep when my Siamese woke me up by pawing my face… he then went and sat on the edge of the bed and growled aggressively (very out of character)… Not 30s later, things started shaking. No idea how he knew, but it was pretty wild. He passed away in 2020, still miss him.
- jmprspret 2y agoCats and dogs have been known to feel/sense earthquakes before we can! In the recent NYC ones there are videos of dogs howling before any of the tremors are noticeable by people. This is a common phenomena I believe.
- btilly 2y agoYes, it is common. See my sibling comment explaining it.
- flakes 2y agoYeah 100%. I live in NYC, and before the quake, our golden retriever started crying and whimpering. A few moments later we felt the quake!
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoHomer Simpson: “Somehow the animals are always the first to know”.
- johnnyAghands 2y agoMy condolences, what a good boy :(
- nyjah 2y agoDang, sorry for your loss. That’s a dope memory of the cat tho. As someone that happened find themselves in Taipei a couple weeks ago for the 7.4, my only thought was getting back to my dog, whom I promised I would get back to. She was sorta freaking out before I left; either could sense me leaving, or sense the earthquake I was heading to…
- johnnyAghands 2y agoYou might say, the cat es-cat-lated it...
- dontdieych 2y agoIt's translated by duckduckgo.com's chatgpt interface. don't down vote plz :D I suspect that I am somewhat sensitive to electromagnetic fields and magnetic fields. There have been times when I have not felt well the next day after sleeping on an electric heating pad, and I have experienced severe discomfort after sleeping on a mattress with magnets. When I used a CRT monitor, I often had diarrhea if I spent a long time in front of the monitor. Since using LCD monitors or laptops, those symptoms have disappeared. When I sleep, there is a wireless router on the right side of my head, and I play youtube videos on my smartphone on the left side. I have strange dreams and wake up early from sleep. However, if I put the smartphone on the right side of my head while sleeping, those symptoms are lessened. Thus, Even though there was no sound, wouldn't your cat have sensed that as well?
- com 2y agoWe once detected a DDOS because all our office phones went down. Silly attackers didn’t realise that our (money-making) APIs weren’t colocated with our public website and phone system.
- nullderef 2y agoTangential question that rose up regarding availability vs. quality of life. For a small startup whose products are only available on the US, does it always make sense to do nightly oncall? This doesn't work for some products, but if, for example, you have a site that sells mattresses in the US, would you wake someone up to fix the site at 3AM? I guess here the main $$ loss would come from accepting so much traffic. But I wonder if we can better differentiate what's worth waking up for.
- euroderf 2y agoWell, "attack" is just "cat-kat" spelled sideways.
- matricaria 2y agoI had an old set of PC speakers which always made as weird sound a few seconds before a new message arrived on my phone.