Updated 3:45 p.m.

Raspberry Pi’s website went black after unknown hackers brought it down with a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS). The website has since been restored.

“For those interested, this one’s quite hardcore: We’re seeing a SYN flood from a botnet that seems to have about a million nodes,” said Raspberry Pi on Twitter. “This is the second attack in a couple of days. We haven’t had the blackmail email yet. It’s getting plonked when it arrives.”

During the attack, the company actively tweeted accounts of the attack, saying they were unable to trace it back to its creator. This, according to Raspberry Pi, is due to the attackers using a “SYN flood” to mask their identities. It believes the attacker is likely an “angry and confused kid” who won’t be able to hold up an expensive attack like this for very much longer.

The company is also unable to get in touch with its host given that it is nighttime in the U.K., where Raspberry Pi is based.

The general question on Twitter concerning the DDOS is “Why?” Raspberry Pi creates cheap micro PCs, which has caught the eye of many. Its foundation arm is also focused on bringing computer science education to children and is involved in other charities.

When asked about why it might be a target, Raspberry Pi tweeted, “Well, we *are* horrid, what with our focus on education and charity and everything. Boo to irritating do-gooders.”

Raspberry Pi image via Flickr

Zooming in on November and December 2012 it’s not hard to spot when Thanksgiving 2012 happened. Fully 1/5 of the attacks that CloudFlare saw in November and December (so far) happened on the Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving:

In the past we’ve seen drops in DDoS attacks on some holidays because the home and office machines used as bots in those attacks have been turned off. For example, this year we noticed a large drop in attack activity on Earth Day (when people are encouraged to switch off their machines to save the planet). But this year’s Thanksgiving attack statistics indicate that plenty of hacked machines were online through the holiday.

But what does this tell us about the coming Christmas holiday period? To answer that we can look back to December 2011. CloudFlare has DDoS data for December 11, 2011 to January 1, 2012 which shows two distinct peaks of attack activity: one just before Christmas and one just after.

So, if 2011 is a guide DDoS attackers will be taking a few days off over Christmas, but will be keeping the pressure on just before and immediately after. That’s probably not a surprise as some fo the attackers will be attempting to disrupt businesses during critical periods for pre- and post-Christmas sales.

Even though there’s a Christmas lull, that doesn’t mean that CloudFlare staff will be letting down their guard, however. We’ll be here working to ensure that whenever attacks arise and from whereever we’re ready to absorb and deflect them.

John Graham-Cumming is the lead programmer at CloudFlare, the content delivery and security network. Prior to CloudFlare he worked at a number of startups and created the award-winning POPFile email machine learning software. He knows way too much about GNU Make having self-published a book entitled GNU Make Unleashed. He joined CloudFlare to take on the task of ‘patching the Internet.’

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc

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