My first DOS

If you tried to reach this blog or anything else on this server this afternoon, you may not have had much luck.

A computer in Korea was hammering my server so hard (aka Denial of Service attack) that my hosting provider temporarily disabled Apache so that my instance didn’t bog down the whole VPS. I was busy at work when this happened and am not sure exactly how long it was out, but this was one of the most severe outages I’ve had in the last three and a half years.

I’ve blocked the offending IP, and made some other tuning adjustments. Up until now I’ve had the luxury of relatively low and predictable traffic, but this incident has gotten me a bit more interested in learning how to handle high loads with Apache/mod_python without eating all memory in sight.

Cory Wright commented on Fri Apr 20 00:33:54 2007:

You might also consider using mod_evasive, an apache module for defending against DoS attacks: http://www.zdziarski.com/projects/mod_evasive/

Paul commented on Fri Apr 20 07:43:28 2007:

Thanks, Cory – a couple other people have suggested that as well, so I’m looking into it.

justice commented on Sat May 26 14:35:00 2007:

So you have identified the attacking IPs. Is it all? No defense against criminals who try to ruin your business ? The attack originators should be penalized by autohorities, or? I was hardly able to find any information on this so any experience woudl be appreciated.

Paul commented on Sat May 26 17:18:08 2007:

I did send a report to the abuse address associated with the netblock of the attacking IP, but didn’t get much of a response.