StreetLoc under a severe DDoS attack.

Yesterday (Sunday, 5/13/2091) StreetLoc came under a severe DDoS attack, a standard tactic used to shutdown a website.  We have seen continued attacks throughout the course of the day today and are actively managing the attack. This likely means that StreetLoc has gained the attention of someone or a group of individuals that do not like what we are doing by providing an alternative to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Amazon.

StreetLoc continues to gather a treasure trove of data during this attack, which we are currently analyzing. We deploy a number of sophisticated countermeasures to mitigate against such attacks and to protect our users against nefarious activity. We will continue to monitor and manage against such attacks now and in the future to ensure that our site stays online and available to our users. These attacks consume resources and can be extremely costly to the website.

We apologize if any of you experienced a disruption in service, we are hard at work managing this attack to keep our site live. 

StreetLoc is privately maintained and sponsored, if you would like to contribute to keeping our platform free of corporate sponsorship and influence please consider a donation to us. Thank you to all of you for your support and for being valued members of our community.

What Is a DDoS Attack?

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one of the most powerful weapons on the internet. When you hear about a website being “brought down by hackers,” it generally means it has become a victim of a DDoS attack. In short, this means that hackers have attempted to make a website or computer unavailable by flooding or crashing the website with too much traffic.

In short, a DDoS attack is a flood of traffic to your web host or server. With enough traffic, an attacker can eat away at your bandwidth and server resources until one (or both) are so inundated that they can no longer function. The server crashes, or there just isn’t enough bandwidth to allow true customers to access your web service. As you can probably guess, this means a crash in your service and loss in revenue for as long as the attack continues.

DDoS attacks can be devastating to an online business, which is why understanding how they work and how to mitigate them quickly is important. During the attack, there isn’t one source, so you can’t just filter one IP to stop it. DDoS attackers infect user systems (that can mean computers but also embedded systems or IoT devices) with software that allows them to control them around the globe. The attacker uses a centralized system that then tells these malware-infected machines to send traffic to the site. The number of machines at the attacker’s disposal depends on the number of machines infected, but it can be in the tens of thousands. To make things worse, DDoS malware is typically very sophisticated and employs techniques to overload your server as efficiently as possible, for example by sending incomplete connection requests that cause wait states on your system, during which the attacking system can send new requests.

The hardest part about a DDoS attack is that there are no warnings. Some large hacking groups will send threats, but for the most part an attacker sends the command to attack your site with no warnings at all.