By participating in this challenge, you give Stack Overflow permission to track your IP address for challenge-related activity and show your results along with all other participants on a public dashboard. Additional rules can be found below in the Designated Route section.
Stack Overflow is partnering with Major League Hacking as part of Global Hack Week!
Throughout this week, we will be challenging you to Hack the Stack!
Like many large internet properties, Stack Overflow regularly deals with DDOS attacks that try to take down our site by sending a deluge of traffic. Our SRE team is responsible for ensuring that we can defend against these and keep Stack Overflow up and running for developers in search of the answers they need to complete their work.
For this challenge, we have devised a way for you to send large amounts of traffic to a specific route on the public Q&A site in a way that is fun and safe. The Stack Overflow SRE team will provide you with progress on your efforts in the form of a real-time, read only, public dashboard that will show your traffic stats! You can earn points for you and your guild by sending large scale traffic towards the Stack Overflow route in the form of a DDOS attack.
The five teams that execute the best DDOS will get a shoutout on the Stack Overflow blog and podcast. Good luck with Hacking the Stack!
Your job will be to send traffic to the designated route, attempt to impact performance of the route, discover how their traffic patterns show up on the public dashboard, and to obviously earn some points! You can participate in the following three ways by order of increasing complexity:
- Points for accessing the public dashboard and being able to infer what it means
- Points for sending any traffic to the route and confirming it via the dashboard
- Points for trying to overwhelm said route and confirming it via the dashboard
The challenge will be active June 5th 12:00PM EST to June 12th 12:00 PM EST.
The route we will use is https://stackoverflow.com/admin.php
- In order to identify your work, we will need you to append a unique identifier to the end of the route.
- For example, https://stackoverflow.com/admin.php?rosendo-hack-the-stack
- We will be able to display your specific route and the traffic you are pointing towards it. Simply follow the same format as above! If you have a common name, include an additional identifier that will make your route more unique (a random sequence of numbers and letters for instance).
- Leaderboard: You can check out your progress here: https://hackp.ac/ghwsec-stackoverflow-leaderboard
- Denial of Service Attack; Wikipedia
- What is a DDoS?
- Stack under attack: Read more about why cybersecurity is so important to Stack Overflow