14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Reddit experienced a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that took the site completely down for a period of 50 minutes. Now, Reddit representatives have published a post to reveal some details of the attack.
According to Reddit Systems Admin Jason Harvey, the attack mitigation strategy was continually adjusted for around 8 hours, time in which the attackers also adjusted their strategy.
For the time being, it’s unknown who is behind the attack or their motivation. The origin of the attack has been traced back to thousands of IP addresses, including ones assigned to hacked mail servers and computers on residential ISPs.
“At peak the attack was resulting in 400,000 requests per second at our CDN layer; 2200% over our previous record peak of 18,000 requests per second,” Harvey wrote in a blog post.
“Even when serving 400k requests a second, a large amount of the attack wasn't getting responded to at all due to various layers of congestion. This suggests that the attacker's capability was higher than what we were even capable of monitoring.”