I stopped reading at "(DDoS =! Anonymous)". I can overlook the gross gramatical errors that permeate TechCrunch's writing, but transposed characters in pseudocode? Can't handle it.
It was enough to take out anyone else who shared the same facility (like us...) and seems to have hammered the Layered Tech border routers into oblivion for 5-10 minutes, so I am guessing it was pretty big.
Do you know if you have any DDoS mitigation devices in front of the border routers? Something from like Arbor Networks or Intruguard? In a few attack scenarios, it really helps.
We're also facing a multi-gigabit attack this week and have dealt with some in the past. Happy to compare notes if you'd like: david@weebly.com.
I should probably know this info but managed to forget it since the site I run has to be placed outside these devices (our everyday traffic is almost indistinguishable from a DDoS.) In fact, that might tell you something, since our Chicago data center was taken out as collateral damage and we sit in front of these devices if you were to draw a big-picture network diagram of the site. From what I can tell so far the attack was just melting the uplinks and it took a few minutes to null-route the various attackers; when things got fixed they did so on specific routes (e.g. Layer3 to the east coast came back before another route the Dallas and the southeast, etc.)
If you're a publisher it's a great deal, we can absorb huge spikes in traffic because the scale of what we do. But you have the risk of being collateral damage in something that affects all of WP.com, like a DDoS or bad code deploy.
On the bright side, anything that impacts all of WP.com is an all-hands-on-deck matter for us since it's the vast majority of our business, so we're as aligned as could be.
I've felt some ripple effects from this on a self hosted blog from plugins that rely on the wordpress.com API for anything (akismet, stats, popular posts). Not good.
