The servers of Telegram, a popular instant messenger, were under a DDoS attack recently. While they were working on the problem, they’ve tweeted a couple of explanations of what’s going on. CNET brings those tweets to our attention, as they explain rather complex things in a very short and simple way.
A DDoS is a “Distributed Denial of Service attack”: your servers get GADZILLIONS of garbage requests which stop them from processing legitimate requests. Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald’s in front of you – and each is ordering a whopper. (1/2)
The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place – but there are so many of them that the server can’t even see you to try and take your order. (2/2)
To generate these garbage requests, bad guys use “botnets” made up of computers of unsuspecting users which were infected with malware at some point in the past. This makes a DDoS similar to the zombie apocalypse: one of the whopper lemmings just might be your grandpa.
There’s a bright side: All of these lemmings are there just to overload the servers with extra work – they can’t take away your BigMac and coke. Your data is safe.
Internet Trends 2019 report is the most comprehensive, detailed, and research document that I have ever seen on what’s going on with the Internet, web, mobile, social media, marketing, and security.
This year’s report spans 333 pages and is full charts, graphs, statistics, insights, and references. And if you are feeling nostalgic, there is an archive of the annual reports going all the way back to 1995.
It’s difficult to pick a single fact from such a huge document, but if I had to, I’d go with this:
51% of the global population, or 3.8 billion people, were Internet users last year.
Finally, after years and years of recommending Let’s Encrypt to everyone, this blog has now followed its own advice and moved to HTTPS. All the old links should be automatically redirected as well, so most people probably won’t notice any difference. But if you do, please do let me know.
This is particularly useful when you need to get familiar with a complex VPC setup by someone else, or when you want to review the results of an automated setup.
htrace.sh is a handy command-line tool for HTTP/HTTPS troubleshooting and profiling. It also integrates with a number of other security tools, like nmap, SSL Labs, subfinder, etc.
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