According to Cloudflare:
Application layer DDoS attacks target the application layer of the Internet in order to disrupt the normal flow of traffic to a website or service.
I founded Anime Motivation without worry as far as DDOS goes. But things change.
At the beginning of the journey with Anime Motivation in 2016, June, none of this could have been imagined to have happened to the website.
Security threats weren’t ever a thing because nobody knew about the website or what it does.
From 2017 onwards, a few security attacks happened here and there, but that ramped up around 2018, and 2019, with 2020 and the pandemic being more major than ever.
Then 2023 and 2024 became the worst for the types of “attacks” that have happened behind the scenes.
Which only proves yet again how relevant the website has become.
You don’t DDOS an anime website (or any website) if it’s not relevant, not known, not doing well, isn’t a threat, or it’s not doing something that pisses people off for unknown reasons.
So that is clearly the case (which of the reasons I don’t know).
DDOS attack email August 29th 2023
As shown in the images on August 29th 2023, the type of DDOS attack was on the application layer.
That simply means the “software” a website uses to create, edit, and publish pages, etc, was the target of the attack instead of the server (hard drive) it’s being hosted on.
But this wasn’t just no ordinary attack, it was a botnet attack. The type of attack is designed to FLOOD the website to such a degree that it taps out because of exhaustion.
It would be like doing everything in your power to drain someone of their energy and stamina, and then pouncing once their “battery” is too low so to speak.
According to Radware:
Botnets have been responsible for some of the most large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Through their sheer volume, these attacks can slow down unprotected networks and servers, and disrupt the normal functioning of websites, mobile applications, and APIs.
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Botnet attacks are no joke and are responsible for taking down some of the biggest websites on earth Like eBay, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, and Airbnb.
So you can see how flattering it is that Anime Motivation was targeted like this, with 100s of thousands of requests in a short space of time.
The attack lasted an entire day. Many of the attacks bypassed Cloudflare (which had a limit) and went straight to the website, which then mitigated an insane amount of requests per second for a few hours.
Between the two sources of protection, they still failed of course.
According to Sucuri
DDoS attacks can have many other motivations including political, hacktivist, terrorist, and business competition. Anyone with a financial or ideological motive can damage an organization by launching a DDoS attack against it.
So that speaks for itself. People hate in silence.
The only known anime sites attacked with DOOS attempts are Crunchyroll
This was back in 2014, which anime news network also reported on during the time.
This speaks volumes as to the potential motives of those attacking Anime Motivation (not to the extent Sony was, but still), and the fact that people obviously have something personal against the website, myself, or a mixture of other things as you don’t just target anyone at random.
More DDOS and DOS attempts have happened since then
DOS comes from one IP address, and for this, its happened for many years, but with more frequency since 2023.
The IPs came from China, the US, Europe, Africa, and various places (not that it matters much).
Whereas a DDOS comes from multiple computers as it were, no different to an army of soldiers trying to take down ONE target.
These DDOS attempts failed because unlike many in the space, the site is secured from top to bottom, not just with the server or a WAF in the cloud, but on the application level as well.
All work in sync and that helped to mitigate the issue as well.
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