Under Fire: What a Real DDoS Attack Looks Like and How We Fought Back
It was a Tuesday afternoon, around 3pm. We were deep into sprint planning when the Slack messages started coming in. “I can’t log in.” “The app is really slow.” “Is something wrong with Privyr?” The first instinct was to look for a simpler explanation. Maybe a flaky deploy. Maybe a user on a slow connection. Then more messages. Then a lot more. I tried to SSH into the box. It would not connect. CPU was pegged. I pulled up the metrics dashboards and stared at the graphs for a few seconds. Request counts were off the charts. Response times had collapsed. This was not a bug. ...