Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

AznHisoka·

DDOS is trending on Twitter now. Could it be an attack?

View on HN

That doesn't seem credible yet

https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/12726471098339409...

Unlikely that an attack would manifest itself in this way. I think it's an SS7 screwup since it seems that signaling is mostly what's gone pear shaped.

SS7 would not affect website uptime. All the carrier websites are having issues.

[edit] As others have pointed out, if b-number routing is failing, then their support sites would be flooded with people checking their account. So maybe the subscribers are in effect overloading the sites. That would make sense.

Couldn't that just be the result of tens of millions of people simultaneously trying to contact support?

Could be. With SS7 outages, first things you would see is b-number analysis failing (call routing) and SMS text messages failing.

As soon as there is a service outage, all the users go to the carrier website to try to complain or log in to check if they've paid their bill, etc.

A website designed for most users to visit once per year when their contract expires likely won't scale to everyone visiting in an hour...

It's a sound theory. Hopefully one of the carriers owns up to their site not having capacity and/or b-number routing flub.

So... it actually is a DDoS attack ;)

People are fearmongering and sharing pictures of DDoS activity out of context. There are always attacks like that going on in the background, it doesn't mean that's the cause.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com