My cat alerted me to a DDoS attack

Pets as Incident Detectors & Animal Behavior

• Many comments share stories of animals alerting humans to problems:
  • Cats waking owners for leaks, earthquakes, or odd events; uncertainty whether they’re “saving” or “sabotaging” their humans.
  • Internet-connected cat feeders failing during outages, with hungry cats forcing humans to discover the issue.
• Discussion branches into animals sensing subtle cues (vibrations, early seismic waves, machine hums) before humans notice.

On‑Call, Startups, and Quality of Life

• Several commenters criticize “informal” always-on vigilance as de facto 24/7 on-call without compensation.
• Others argue that at small, early-stage startups with few critical off-hours incidents, informal triage can work, especially when technical founders absorb much of the pain.
• European experiences: structured rotations, explicit bonuses, and counting nighttime incident hours toward normal work help make on-call acceptable.
• Debate over whether some businesses (e.g., US-only consumer sites) truly need to wake engineers at 3 a.m. for all outages.

DDoS Mitigation Approaches

• Token buckets are discussed as a common rate-limiting algorithm that can thwart many, but not all, DDoS types; they’re positioned as one tool in a broader resilience strategy.
• Distinction between:
  • Application-level attacks, mitigated by avoiding expensive work for unauthenticated/cheap clients.
  • Volumetric attacks, where bandwidth capacity and upstream filtering dominate.
• Techniques mentioned: WAFs, Cloud providers (e.g., CDNs), BGP-based filters, and null routing.
• Null routing is seen as protecting the wider network at the cost of the victim’s availability. Proposals to drop traffic from suspected botnet sources face scalability and spoofing challenges.

Extortion, Ransoms, and Ethics

• Multiple anecdotes describe extortion emails demanding Bitcoin to stop DDoS.
• Several organizations refused to pay and instead invested in DDoS mitigation, sometimes at higher cost, arguing that paying incentivizes repeat attacks.
• Counterpoint: some ransomware operators reportedly cultivate a “reliable” reputation to encourage victims to pay, but others note high rates of non-recovery even when victims pay.
• A historical “paying protection money never ends well” analogy is cited.

Pattern Recognition, Weird Signals & Humor

• Stories of humans sensing “something’s off” in dashboards, games, or machinery before failures occur, attributed to subconscious pattern recognition.
• Light-hearted speculation about cats as the real attackers, puns on “cat-tacks,” and jokes about the post reading like a cloud-provider ad.