Fifth of December, anno domini 2025… Day as any working day… Autumn, cold Friday, weekend is near. Kind of slow, everything as usual… Around 12.00 some remote workers felt some outage of our platform. Usually, the answer is their local ISP. This time – it was something different.
Autumn cleaning
For a couple of days, we were doing something usual, not perfectly aware how much it can cost us. It was cleaning of fake accounts. We do that regularly, keeping our system and database clean. But this time, we probably cleaned some “important player” and the cost of cleaning in autumn became quite expensive.
This outage became persistent. We couldn’t reach our platform, our servers… Almost paralyzed. And soon the things gets clear – we are under a huge DDoS attack. In no time, our tech crew was ready in battle positions. The attack was huge, but after a few hours of battle, in and out of DC, our services finally woke up. At least some of them. Our platform still wasn’t ready to show her face.
In the middle of the night…
When finally we got all set and done, it was late evening. Okay, we are not Cloudflare who recently was down for couple of hours – it took us some 10ish hours to be okay.
All of sudden, a second wave struck us in the night. Harder. And we took drastic measures. Without much help from our ISP and DC, we took everything in our hands and we soon found a solution. In the middle of the night, our platforms were showing their faces.
Alive and kicking back
All our systems are alive. No lost of data. Everything just delayed. We upgraded very fast the security of the platform and services, and we found a way to slash attacks. Further fortification and fine tuning are in progress.
But we didn’t stop just there. We took drastic measures regarding legal issues. Police and all relevant institutions are informed, and we launch the investigation with digital forensics to find out who is behind all this. And we will be persistent, as we were when fighting with DDoS attacks. What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.
Piece of advice for the end: cleaning was meant for spring, not autumn – it can cost you surfing on some DDoS waves if you clean anything but leaves.
