FCC's Former-CIO Responds to DDoS Attack Claims

A response to FCC Emails Show Agency Spread Lies to Bolster Dubious DDoS Attack Claims.

Whether the correct phrase is denial of service or “bot swarm” or “something hammering the Application Programming Interface” (API) of the commenting system — the fact is something odd was happening in May 2017. My quick analysis of the ratio of 35,000 API requests per minute we were receiving relative to the number of 90,000 comments being filed in the first half of the day, indicated that ratio to be extraordinarily high and lopsided (the Team also relayed that the API requests were continuing to increase, so we were seeing at least 2 million API requests per hour around the middle of the day — yet not a similar number of comments being received). If folks want evidence, there were emails sent by the Team as their analysis of the logs observed the API requests per minute continue to spike. Separate from actual people wanting to comment, I was concerned we were also being spammed by something automated. If this continued, it might deny system resources from actual people wanting to comment on the high-profile issue. This was my biggest concern.