from Hacker News

My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

by dguo on 4/14/24, 8:12 PM with 106 comments

by jameshart on 4/14/24, 9:44 PM
As always it’s easy to overlook the insider threat. Grammatically dubious extortion emai? Bitcoin ransom? Did it not occur to you that the cat was the one behind the attack?
by exabrial on 4/15/24, 2:07 AM
We don’t have very many earthquakes in Kansas… but I remember the first/only one I felt.
I was sound asleep when my Siamese woke me up by pawing my face… he then went and sat on the edge of the bed and growled aggressively (very out of character)… Not 30s later, things started shaking.
No idea how he knew, but it was pretty wild. He passed away in 2020, still miss him.
by lmm on 4/14/24, 10:07 PM
Maybe the phone was silent but still flashing a screen? Mine does that in that mode.
At my first job we had a guy who could spot incidents coming on the monitoring dashboard before they happened. He never managed to explain or even understand what he was looking for and no-one else picked it up, but he would just see something that made him say things were odd, and most of the time we'd get an alert shortly after.
by fragmede on 4/14/24, 11:32 PM
The princely sum of $5,000. We got that at my employer back in 2016. We got hit by a ddos, and decided to ignore it, though we did dig up some BTC just in case. We enacted a bunch of DDoS protection as a result, costing way more than $5,000, but not paying money to extortionists is worth every penny.
by ed_mercer on 4/14/24, 11:21 PM
> We didn’t reply, though in retrospect, it could have been fun to try to troll them.
Not replying is the only valid answer. Trolling them could potentially put you more on their radar and get targeted for other attacks. And for what?
by EveryPizza on 4/14/24, 11:34 PM
Quite some time ago, someone from my family was alerted by their cat when the dishwasher was leaking. Their conclusion was that the cat was either trying to save them or the cat was trying to kill them.
by ahmedfromtunis on 4/14/24, 10:43 PM
> With horrible grammar
Ah, the days before ChatGPT!
On a more serious note, do you think there will ever be a way to stop ddos attacks once and for all?
While all threats are bad, ddos is the most lame type of attacks there is; no special skill or knowledge are needed, just load a script or, heck, pay someone who'll execute it for you as a service.
by swampthinker on 4/14/24, 9:26 PM
And here I thought your somehow hooked up a cat feeder to alerts.
Regardless, very cute - what’s your cat’s name?
by retreatguru on 4/15/24, 12:43 AM
Reminds me of this book: Dogs that Know When their Owners are Coming Home https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/dogs-tha...
by jart on 4/14/24, 9:52 PM
It's so easy to crush ddos with token buckets that usually the only thing I need my cat to wake me for is when my Discord gets raided.
by nullderef on 4/15/24, 1:11 PM
Tangential question that rose up regarding availability vs. quality of life.
For a small startup whose products are only available on the US, does it always make sense to do nightly oncall? This doesn't work for some products, but if, for example, you have a site that sells mattresses in the US, would you wake someone up to fix the site at 3AM?
I guess here the main $$ loss would come from accepting so much traffic. But I wonder if we can better differentiate what's worth waking up for.
by euroderf on 4/15/24, 2:44 PM
Well, "attack" is just "cat-kat" spelled sideways.
by Denvercoder9 on 4/14/24, 10:05 PM
> we didn’t have a formal on-call rotation yet. That was a deliberate decision, since being on-call is painful, and the team was good about just collectively keeping an eye out for urgent alerts.
That seems like a terrible solution. Yeah, being on-call is painful, but at least I know beforehand when I'll be on-call and get compensated for it. Always being expected to keep an eye out for urgent alerts just sucks all around.
by cocoa19 on 4/14/24, 9:46 PM
And I often wonder if on call is justifiable “because you make more money than most professionals”.
by matricaria on 4/16/24, 5:11 AM
I had an old set of PC speakers which always made as weird sound a few seconds before a new message arrived on my phone.
by mmahemoff on 4/14/24, 9:34 PM
I thought it was going to be a home server that went into overdrive, heating the room your cat was in or knocking out the aircon.
Anyway, better experience than being woken up by a dozen SMS alerts.
by com on 4/15/24, 10:44 AM
We once detected a DDOS because all our office phones went down. Silly attackers didn’t realise that our (money-making) APIs weren’t colocated with our public website and phone system.
by ro_bit on 4/14/24, 9:26 PM
So that's why they want us to microchip our pets!
by avg_dev on 4/14/24, 10:52 PM
> But in 9 years, that was the only time she did it while I was sleeping.
... that you know of
by johnnyAghands on 4/15/24, 2:44 AM
You might say, the cat es-cat-lated it...
by AtlasBarfed on 4/14/24, 10:48 PM
Is this an ad for AWS?
by fuzztester on 4/14/24, 11:58 PM
cattackstic!
cattackstrophic!
by dontdieych on 4/15/24, 6:38 AM
It's translated by duckduckgo.com's chatgpt interface. don't down vote plz :D
I suspect that I am somewhat sensitive to electromagnetic fields and magnetic fields. There have been times when I have not felt well the next day after sleeping on an electric heating pad, and I have experienced severe discomfort after sleeping on a mattress with magnets.
When I used a CRT monitor, I often had diarrhea if I spent a long time in front of the monitor.
Since using LCD monitors or laptops, those symptoms have disappeared.
When I sleep, there is a wireless router on the right side of my head, and I play youtube videos on my smartphone on the left side. I have strange dreams and wake up early from sleep. However, if I put the smartphone on the right side of my head while sleeping, those symptoms are lessened.
Thus,
Even though there was no sound, wouldn't your cat have sensed that as well?