14 DAY TRIAL // A website focused on topics relating to feminism has become the target of a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack on Sunday, March 8, the International Women’s Day.
This is not the first attack of this kind against Femsplain.com, but it would be one of the strongest ones. The attack seems to have started around 4 PM and quickly gained in intensity, ending with taking the website offline.
Finding the culprit is not an easy job
After a few hours, the blog came back online, although it was clear that it had not fully recovered yet, according to The Verge.
If the attackers sought to make Femsplain less vocal, they managed to do exactly the opposite as they drew more attention to the online spot and its community.
Amber Gordon, the founder of the website, published on Sunday an image with the traffic received by Femsplain during the attack.
A DDoS occurs when massive traffic is directed to one service, to the point that the requests can no longer be processed. As a result, the machines enter a denial-of-service condition and are unable to continue doing their job until the number of requests is reduced to fit their capacity.
Such an attack can be easily conducted by anyone with a few dollars to spend. Services offering to knock a target offline are far from difficult to find. In most cases, less than $150 / €138 is enough for an eight-hour long assault.
Thus, finding the real culprit behind the incident is quite difficult, especially since DDoS services employ different protection measures that hide the identity of the customers. Moreover, the clients themselves take precautions to keep their real identity secret.
Successful crowdfunding
Recently, Femsplain successfully completed a Kickstarter campaign to receive funding for a new website design and better web hosting. The project required $25,000 / €23,000 and ended up with $30,608 / €28,171.
An individual making inquiries about the cost estimates promoted for the crowdfunding ($3,000 / €2,760 for creating a new website and $600 / €552 per month for web hosting costs) received no answer from Gordon, on account that he was not a backer of the project and he was not entitled to disclose this sort of information.
The details of the conversation have been posted publicly.