On Thursday, February 20, 2003, at about 0130 GMT, the popular LiveJournal site became the victim of a massive distributed denial-of-service attack. LiveJournal staffers and upstream providers first tried to filter by IP, but they soon discovered what the "D" in . . .
On Thursday, February 20, 2003, at about 0130 GMT, the popular LiveJournal site became the victim of a massive distributed denial-of-service attack. LiveJournal staffers and upstream providers first tried to filter by IP, but they soon discovered what the "D" in DDOS means. After blocking about one quarter of the IP addresses on the Internet, they got on their load balancer and implemented some unknown but effective measures (repeated e-mails to them went unanswered). I can only assume these measures included some quality of service/rate limiting methods. Despite continued flooding, the site returned to usability after about four days of being somewhere between slow and totally unreachable.

Being a paid LiveJournal subscriber myself, I roused myself from the storm of dark imprecations on the soul of someone who would try to destroy a site that has become the epitome of "on-line community" to wonder, what do you do about such an event?

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