Since 4 a.m. Friday, a computer at a Swedish IT company made more than 1.5 million web requests to my web site URouLette, which links to random web pages stored in a MySQL database. They're coming in at a speed of 38 requests a second. My MySQL database server can't handle that many requests, so by Friday afternoon Workbench and a bunch of other sites slowed to a crawl as the web server began belching black smoke. A massive crash was imminent.
The last time somebody did this, I used the Linux utility iptables to reject all connections from the offending IP address, which solved the problem easy peasy lemon squeezy. This time around, iptables failed with a "Can't open dependencies file" error.
My new friend in Sweden appears to be building a database of web addresses by requesting a URouLette script that loads a random web page over and over. This is both obnoxious and dumb -- all links on URouLette come from the Open Directory Project and can be downloaded in one file. I've reduced the severity of the problem by sending the same link with every request -- the company's home page.
Flooding a web server with this many requests constitutes a denial of service attack. In the time I've composed this blog entry, another 100,000 requests have been made. Ironically, an employee of the company blogged recently that it was suffering its own attack, though on a much larger scale:
Tens of thousands of machines on the internet suddenly started trying to access a single host within the network. The IP they targeted has in fact never been publicly used as long as we've owned it (which is just a bit under two years) and it has never had any public services.
We have no clue whatsoever why someone would do this against us. We don’t have any particular services that anyone would gain anything by killing. We're just very puzzled.
Our "ISP", the guys we buy bandwidth and related services from, said they used up about 1 gigabit/sec worth of bandwidth and with our "mere" 10megabit/sec connection it was of course impossible to offer any services while this was going on.
This is a good time to mention that I never liked Bjorn Borg.
