Comment by lofaszvanitt
7 hours ago
Why everyone needs to be behind Cloudflare. I don't think DDOSing sites out of whim is so rampant that everyone needs the virtual umbrella.
7 hours ago
Why everyone needs to be behind Cloudflare. I don't think DDOSing sites out of whim is so rampant that everyone needs the virtual umbrella.
It's the web-scrapers. I run a tiny little mom and pop website, and the bots were consistently using up all of my servers' resources. Cloudfare more or less instantly resolved it.
Caching would have been the correct answer
You mean you outsourced to Cloudflare the decision on who is allowed to view your website. That could be well-intentioned, but it's a risky thing to do, and I would not to outsource that decision. Especially as I wouldn't know who failed to get to my website as there is no way to appeal the decision.
As a side note, what does your site do that it's possible to use up all server resources? Computers are stupid fast these days. I find it's really difficult to build something that doesn't scale to at least multiple hundreds of requests per second.
You'd be amazed how easy it is to take down a janky decades old LAMP stack.
I’ve been DDoS’d countless times running a small scale, uncontroversial SaaS. Without them I would’ve had countless downtime periods with really no other way to mitigate.
There's plenty of DDoS if you're dealing with people petty enough.
The VPS I use will nuke your instance if you run a game server. Not due to resource usage, but because it attracts DDoS like nothing else. Ban a teen for being an asshole and expect your service to be down for a week. And there isn't really Cloudflare for independent game servers. There's Steam Networking but it requires the developer to support it and of course Steam.
Valve's GDC talk about DDoS mitigation for games: https://youtu.be/2CQ1sxPppV4
It actually is.
I run a small video game forum with posts going back to 2008. We got absolutely smashed by bots scraping for training data for LLMs.
So I put it behind Cloudflare and now it's down. Ho hum.
Have you tried Anubis or similar tools? I've had similar issues with bot scraping of a forum taking all server resources, and using PoW challenge solved the problem.
https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
I did! It's very cool tech. However for our config it was easier to slap CF in front of it.
I will say one very appealing use of Anubis I'd love to try is using it as a Traefik middleware to protect services running in docker containers.
Same problem here. If I didn't use Cloudflare, nearly all of my traffic would be (apparently misconfigured) scraper bots.
Can you please elaborate on “smashed”? I’m very interested
I took a screenshot of the graph in cloudflare when I switched on the bot challenges.
https://i.ibb.co/qHCJyY7/image.png
I wrote the below to explain to our users what was happening, so apologies if the language is too simple for a HN reader.
- 0630, we switched our DNS to proxy through CF, starting the collection of data, and implemented basic bot protections
- Unfortunately whatever anti-bot magic they have isn't quite having the effect, even after two hours.
- 0830, I sign in and take a look at the analytics. It seems like <SITE NAME> is very popular in Vietnam, Brazil, and Indonesia.
- 0845, I make it so users from those countries have to pass a CF "challenge". This is similar to a CAPTCHA, but CF try to make it so there's no "choosing all the cars in an image" if they can help it.
- So far 0% of our Asian audience have passed a challenge.
It'd funny if these bots were run by Cloudflare.
Ha, yeah. They seemed to mostly be in SE Asia.
I was arrested by Interpol in 2018 because of warrants issued by the NCA, DOJ, FBI, J-CAT, and several other agencies, all due to my involvement in running a DDoS-for-hire website. Honestly, anyone can bypass Cloudflare, and anyone that want to take your website down - will take it down. It's just that luckily for all of us most of the DDoS-4-hire websites are down nowadays but there are still many botnets out there that will get past basically any protection and you can get access to them for basically $5.
> anyone can bypass Cloudflare
How?
Plenty of ways to leak the original server IP address if it isn't really well hardened against that (and most aren't).
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One minute, what? Can you elaborate on that. I have loads of questions. What exactly were you doing? What consequences did you face? How come you are talking about it?
because I'm from Serbia so I was released immediately instead of actually being jailed like my friend from Croatia ~
There are plenty of alternatives to protect against DDoSing, people like convenience though. “Nobody gets fired for choosing Microsoft/Cloudflare”. We have a culture problem
Good chance the reason DDOSing isn't so big anymore is because everyone is on Cloudflare.
No but because all of us were arrested in 2018 for running DDoS-4-hire services. Bypassing cloudflare is very easy and I still can fry any of your websites (if i wanted to, just like any other skid)
Cloudflare DDOS protection is super essential (especially for smaller businesses)
DDoS prevention may be essential, but not CloudFlare.
Who is motivated to launch DDoS against smaller businesses? What do they have to gain?
My small SaaS app has been DDoSed a handful of times, always accompanied by an email asking for a ransom in the form of bitcoin.
The first time we switched to Cloudflare which saved us. Even with Cloudflare, the DDoS attempts are still damaging (the site goes down, we use Cloudflare to block the endpoints they're targeting, they change endpoints, etc.) but manageable. Without Cloudflare or something like it, I think it's possible that we'd be out of business.
Anyone that has $5.
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DDOSing is absolutely so rampant that you need to be behind something.
Nope, I'm at hetzner and haven't seen a DDoS in years.
So am I and neither did I... up until a week ago. Now my server's being hammered with bot traffic 24/7.
Because of 2018 operation "Power OFF" but it's still pretty easy to take anything down.
Hetzner has the WEAKEST DDoS protection out of ANYTHING out there - Arbor sucks.
Send me your website url and I'll keep it down for DAYS and whenever you cry to hetzner I'll just fry it again, it's that easy and that's why they're the cheapest - because everyone ran away from them back then.
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Analogously, arson attacks against businesses in Palermo are absolutely so rampant that they need to be protected by someone.
I run a few websites with moderate traffic (~900K daily page views total) on the same VPS and never had an issue with DDOS. Is this specific to some industries?
Literally specific to "did I make this skid angry or not", it takes $5 to DDoS a website (bypassing cloudflare included)
Depends on what those websites are and how lucky you are.
Hm, interesting times we live in.
> Gooo gooo gaa gaaa look at this basic cassus beli I swallowed!!!
And yet my website is still up today, and has not been down for years.
Honestly it kinda is. Ai bots scrape everything now, social media means you can go viral suddenly, or you make a post that angers someone and they launch an attack just because. I default to cloudflare, because like an umbrella I might just be carrying it around most of the time, but in the case of a sudden downpoor it's better than getting wet.
It's not super common, but common enough that I don't want to deal with it.
The other part is just how convenient it is with CF. Easy to configure, plenty of power and cheap compared to the other big ones. If they made their dashboard and permission-system better (no easy way to tell what a token can do last I checked), I'd be even more of a fan.
If Germany's Telekom was forced to peer on DE-CIX, I'd always use CF. Since they aren't and CF doesn't pay for peering, it's a hard choice for Germany but an easy one everywhere else.