Black Friday is pretty much a tat sale now.
If an organised and sustained effort to browse heavily some website took place, would it be enough to cause increased website costs for the company?
The big sites planning their year on selling masses of junk on one weekend no doubt expect their systems to scale up accordingly, and they plan for that cost.
How much browsing, by how many more people browsing and not buying, would be needed to cause them significant costs?
Possible?
So many companies don’t value their customers, their data or value.
It is time to change that, but how?
Without some proper security issue to take advantage of such as a very intense custom search and automating it with a script to spam it while cycling IP addresses you’ll not get anywhere.
A single person doing something expected continuously is unlikely to be able to spend $1 of capacity at pretty much any website.
If you want to make a dent you need to aim for around 100k small requests a second that actually hit the database and not just cache.
The issue is that if you want something they can’t cache you have to be logged in, but if you’re logged in you can be blocked. You could target small/medium businesses but that’s probably not the ones you’re after.
The one exception to this is CC validity checks. You can generate random card numbers, expiry dates, and security codes that pass the computational checks unherent to those numbers for all credit cards. Then the CC company charges like $0.03 per lookup or something. I’ve seen it used against scammers who don’t know what they’re doing where you spam thousands of tries per second until they shut the site down.
by how many more people
Sysadmin here. Forget about it. People are a drop in the ocean on website requests nowadays. Anything is getting hammered all day long already by legions of bots. Mostly scrapers and many more bad actors. The numbers are staggering - one could simply not compete by hammering F5 for refresh any more.
People? Hah. We’ll all have agents for that soon whether we like it or not.
I hate this timeline. So much.
The concept you are talking about is a called a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. Typcially that is down with malware, there is another type that uses bots that is called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. In a DOS attack the malware overwhelms the capabilities of a website, email server, ftp server etc to the point where it fails.
If the number of people browsing the site do not overwhelm the site it won’t cost the company shit. Any CDN/web hosting company worth a damn will have the capacity to handle the black Friday weekend surge.
This is called a Distributed Denial of Service attack, it won’t work, or you need more resources and criminality. (DDOS)
Thank you overseers for not fucking me up the ass
You would need a lot of people, and they have CDNs to fight this. I doubt it’s useful or possible.
I would suggest not using the site if they don’t value their customers or their data, I know that hard. But if you can find the thing else where that is going to have a bigger impact
You’re suggesting the “reddit hug of death” as a weapon. It would have to be something much smaller. Certainly not Amazon, who runs their own web services.
Netflix had an issue with Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson at around 100 million viewers. Caused some streaming issues for many people. Those are the sorts of numbers you’d need to make those bigger websites even flinch a little. And that was people streaming video, not simply visiting the website. Also it was one of Netflix’s very first live events, so the technical issues probably hadn’t been worked out yet.
If a bunch of people went to Walmart.com or something, and all started streaming video. There’s definitely a level where it would crash the site. Probably in the hundreds of millions. However you’d have to coordinate this ahead of time, and in recruiting 300 million people for your plan they’d hear about it and be prepared for it, so I can’t imagine this actually working.
How much backbone do you have available?
You’d have to either saturate their network or their compute.
Most websites offload a ton of the processing to the client. So you’d likely have to beat cloudflare at their business model.
It’ll be mitigated within the duration of a fart. -toot-
No. All bigger websites already have DDOS protection.
