Reddit slammed by massive online attack
Reddit聽suffered a massive聽distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack Friday that stretched into the afternoon.
At 6:02 a.m., the Reddit status Twitter account that the website was working to recover from what appeared to be a DDoS. A DDoS is when a botnet is sent out to cripple a server or to steal information from it. The source of the attack has not yet been announced.
A Reddit admin that goes by the username Alienth on an AskReddit thread that the person or people attacking the site have 鈥渁 lot of time and bandwidth on their hands.鈥� Alienth a graph of Reddit鈥檚 server load, that none of the admins had ever seen an attack at this scale.
"All we know is it is blatantly malicious,"聽 a Reddit representative, according to The Huffington Post.
The attack on Reddit comes the morning that Boston has shutdown as a citywide manhunt continues for one of the Boston Marathon聽bombing suspects. Reddit users had been actively pursuing and trying to help solve the bombing. The Internet sleuths offered high-res pictures and information with regards to the case. The users鈥� interests, however, did not always end successfully. Their own investigations have led to false accusations. As the manhunt began on Friday, Reddit featured a live stream of the breaking events. It is still unclear whether Friday鈥檚 events have anything to do with the DDoS attack on Reddit.
Reddit, in the meantime, has聽 that it managed to 鈥渕itigate part of the DDoS at this time鈥� but that 鈥渃ertain site functions are disabled.鈥�
鈥淭he Internet鈥檚 not working. Or at least the self-styled 鈥榝ront page of the Internet,' 鈥� VentureBeat鈥檚 John Koetsier. 鈥淥ne thing seems to be clear: The outages are deliberate, not simply caused by a flood of traffic from the ongoing Boston manhunt for the marathon bomber who remains at large.鈥�
Reddit is working for the most part, but the site can be slow to load. For now, the website continues to handle the attack.聽
For more tech news, follow Aimee on聽Twitter, @aimee_ortiz
