Homeless in Vancouver: DDoS attack looks like one-sided Pong!

Logstalgia is a website-access log-visualization tool that replays or streams—in real time—log data as a colourful 2D video animation.

It shows incoming requests to the website as a stream of particles, which either hit the server or miss. The most boring traffic stats look like pong as played by the “Operator” in The Matrix movies. Cute but so what?

Feed Logstalgia the logs of a Distributed Denial of Service attack and the result is mesmerizing and instructive—you can actually watch an attack. And in this case, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Almost a year ago Logstalgia was used to capture an April 23, 2013, DDoS attack on the web download infrastructures of VideoLAN (the makers of the open source free multimedia player VLC).

NSFW alert!

This sensational bit of geek porn was made by Ludovic Fauvet, a part-time VLC developer and one of the sysadmin of the VideoLAN infrastructures.

Fauvet tweeted news of the attack in progress on April 23, 2013.

The attack lasted for over 30 hours. At one point, the download requests reached 200 per second, totaling 30 Gbps.

Later, Fauvet said the deluge of traffic had reached as high as 400 requests per second. Fauvet also said that VideoLAN had no trouble dealing with it.

I had no idea “Dee-DOS” attacks were accompanied by thumpy electronica music! I could watch hours of this. Sadly the clip is only 29 seconds long.