This morning one of our client sites was the focus of a sustained DDoS attack. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) happens when a network of slave machines unleash repeated requests for information on a website, with the intetion of taking the system / site / server to breaking point. 

Why? Really have no idea. Some people just get off doing bad things I guess. And there's no reason at all that this client (more of a demo system as it goes) should have become the focus of anyone's wrath. Just one of those things that happens when you're in the web based software solutions business I guess :-]

At it's peak the site was taking over 3,700 requests a second (that's 1.3million requests an hour!!) from places as far flung as Romania and Italy. 

Now initially it did put a little strain on some of our facilities and so some clients may have witnessed a slowing down in terms of system responsivenss, however as soon as we became alerted to the attack we switched this to be a critical priority and dealt with it to ensure there was no down time. As with all these things there are some learns for us, but in all our 7 years' of doing business we've never seen anything of this scale, so we're "happy" that we handled this in a way fitting to our client promise - and this is just us being "open & honest", a very key value of ours.

If you have any questions on this, or would like further technical information then please don't hesitate to contact us directly through your Account Manager, the Support Team or me directly alex@3dmarcomms.com