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Comment by 300bps | Hacker News Reader

I read the summary at http://www.arbornetworks.com/asert/2013/11/healthcare-gov-do...

Sorry, I don't buy that anyone would've written a custom application to DDoS a web site by slowly loading two relatively static pages on the site when there are a billion tools out there that will do the same thing far more effectively (see LOIC for just one popular example).

This almost seems like a false flag to make healthcare.gov into an innocent victim of a DDoS attack when as the original article says there is no evidence of an actual DDoS attack.

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The security researcher quoted in the article agree with you:

  > Arbor researcher Marc Eisenbarth said there's no evidence
  > Healthcare.gov has withstood any significant denial-of-service
  > attacks since going live last month. He also said the 
  > limited request rate, the lack of significant
  > distribution, and other features of the tool's underlying 
  > code made it unlikely that it could play a significant 
  > role in taking down the site.

Although, I will say that if the tool is grabbing the dependencies of each page (which in total comes to about a megabyte per page load), it might add up over time. Yeah, it's static, and yeah, it's not LOIC (it'd surprise me if LIOC weren't also being used against this site), but the site debs didn't do themselves any favors with the size and number of their static assets.

I agree with this viewpoint, though I think it's also possible that a lone actor, frustrated with Obamacare, acted out using the only tools he knew in a 1/2 hour.

It wouldn't surprise me if healthcare.gov was very vulnerable to DDOS attacks - we are talking about a 2013 site which is hosted in a single data-center.

I wonder if a five 9's site is possible from a single datacenter. I can't imagine why not, given it's 3,000m under a mountain.

A five 9's website is much easier to achieve using multiple, redundant, data centers.

Otherwise you end up with unforeseen events, like a tornado taking out power, or a backhoe incident, or internet outages.

There is no evidence that it's a "false flag" either. We'll just have to wait it out for more information.

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