I Experienced My First DDoS Attack

As a website owner or administrator, experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack can be a very scary and overwhelming experience. In a DDoS attack, a malicious actor attempts to flood a website or online service with traffic from multiple sources, rendering it inaccessible to legitimate users. In this blog post, we will explore a recent incident where I had my first DDoS attack and what I did to mitigate the attack.

The DDoS attack I experienced started because I did an @everyone in a Discord server with over 75k members in it. At the time, the server had 16k people online because I was giving away tons of Steam games. Little did I know that this seemingly harmless act would lead to my first DDoS attack.

Shortly after sending the @everyone message, I started to notice that my website was slowing down. As more and more traffic started hitting my site, it eventually went down completely. I tried accessing it from different devices and locations, but it was clear that the site was inaccessible to anyone.

At this point, I realized that I was under attack and took immediate action. The first thing I did was log in to my Cloudflare account and enable "under attack mode" in the dashboard. This mode helps to protect websites from attacks like these by presenting a challenge page to users, asking them to verify that they are not a bot. This challenge page helps to filter out malicious traffic and only allows legitimate traffic to access the site.

After turning on "under attack mode", I waited for a few minutes and checked my website again. To my relief, my site was back up and running as expected. The attack lasted for about 3 minutes, and during that time, my site was completely inaccessible. However, thanks to Cloudflare's protection, I was able to bring my site back up right away.

In conclusion, DDoS attacks are a real and constant threat that website owners and administrators need to be aware of. It can happen to anyone, and the best way to protect against it is by using a service like Cloudflare. By enabling "under attack mode", I was able to mitigate the attack and bring my site back up within minutes. If you're a website owner or administrator, make sure you have a plan in place to handle a DDoS attack, and consider using a service like Cloudflare to help protect against it.