For the last four years, the Deflect DDoS mitigation system has protected independent online voices from the onslaught of cyber-attacks aiming to silence them. We have grown, learning our lessons as we took the punches. One aspect of this work stood out as particularly interesting during this time: there were stories to be told in the sea of data brought on by each attack. Those stories could shine a light in the direction of the provenance of the attacks and the motivations of the actors behind them. Most importantly, it would aid the advocacy efforts of the targeted website and begin to strip away the impunity for launching these attacks, raising their cost in the long run. The more they attack us, the smarter we’ll get.
Deflect Labs is a new effort to collect and study distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks launched against the websites we protect. It is built on a variety of open source tools, utilizing machine learning, time-series anomaly detection and botnet classification tools, many of which have been contributed to or wholly developed by eQualit.ie’s Deflect team. We aim to responsibly share news and our analysis of the attacks in a series of ongoing reports, the first of which is released today.
