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Comment by anurag | Hacker News Reader

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Everything is back up. We're waiting for Cloudflare's RCA and will follow up with additional Render context right after.

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(Render CEO) While Cloudflare investigates the issue on their end, we're also working on ways to bypass Cloudflare.

Really sorry about this, folks. We'll keep https://status.render.com updated and will post an RCA once things calm down.

Cloudflare have declared an incident at https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/2xffnv666yd7.

In case you're wondering, we use Cloudflare to keep Render's network up during DDoS attacks. Both Render and our customers are often targeted. We've already started building a product that lets customers bypass Cloudflare altogether, and I expect we'll see more demand for it after today's incident.

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Thanks for the response anurag.

We really like Render but are running into issues with Cloudflare blocking requests that are incorrectly flagged as malicious (our service passes code blocks over HTTP, similar to Replit).

Not to mention our site was down for way too long this evening…

We’d consider staying if we can bypass Cloudflare altogether. Render has been stable otherwise.

As a quick workaround, try base64 encoding your payloads.

Great idea for a simple fix. We’ve worked around the issue already, but it’d be nice if we could just trust our own authenticated content without the extra hoops.

Send me an email (address in profile) if you'd like alpha access to this feature.

Sent.

> We've already started building a product that lets customers bypass Cloudflare altogether

Really happy to hear this. Thank you.

Thanks for the transparency here!

Why are DDoS attacks a thing?

Who spends resources (money?) on running those? What is the incentive?

typically done via hacked bot farms that cost the attacker nothing other than the fun of rolling out standardized scripted attacks on poorly configured servers.

Why they do it... well:

Competition suppression

Vindictive nastiness

Fun

Just because you can (the world is your sandbox)

Other reasons that might not occur to you but are very real for the attacker...

DDoS attacks basically are still a thing because there's nobody really incentivized to solve it.

The people harmed by them are too small to fix it, and the people big enough make more money selling DDoS mitigation.

From what I understand you can avoid many DDoS just by going IPv6 only, because DDoS mainly depends on unpatched shitmachines from the old days.

IPv6 can help with a small scale attack, but not a large one. Your ISP can still be DDoSed, although it is a bit more difficult to do that.

We (fintech bank) were DDoS a few times and sent ransom emails

"we'll stop these DDoS attacks if you pay us!" - chris@notcloudflare.com

The ol' window manufacturer trick /s

They don't spend that many resources. Most participants in DDoS attacks are sometimes innocently recruited victims. Either victim of their own ignorance or victim of developers lack of care for secure defaults. In other words, some software product is deployed where it should not be...Then....The people and/or AI's who want to run these attacks, explore standard protocol behavior.

"Memcrashed - Major amplification attacks from UDP port 11211" - https://blog.cloudflare.com/memcrashed-major-amplification-a...

> Who spends resources (money?) on running those?

A raspberry pi can generate enough traffic to overload an otherwise unprotected service. It doesn't cost much, if anything to launch a brute force attack.

There's been posts on here about malicious browser extensions, infected IOT devices, malware in mobile apps that give someone the means to launch an utterly brutal attack. Imagine if I had a service that could handle 10k rps. Now imagine 600k android devices from all across the world send one request per second each [0].

[0] https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/pl/security/news/mobile-saf...

HN regular conducts DDoS attacks on small weak websites.

(Happy Render customer) — Looking forward to the updates on this feature.

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