DDoS, Distributed Denial of Service, is one of the most effective ways of bringing a remote server to its knees. It is very effective because it is almost impossible to distinguish between legitimate and malicious traffic. Today I experienced the results of one major DDoS “attack”.

In Sweden these days you get your application results for all higher education over the internet, from the page http://www.studera.nu. You log in with your social security number and a password. Yesterday, the servers sent out an automated e-mail message telling that the applications have been processed and that I could now log in to see the results.

Lie.

Not until 10:00 today the results were finished and the gates opened for me to log in. Gates, by the way. I should have called them dam gates, because the flood that followed was immense. All existing students have to re-apply for the next year as well as the new students, so there are about 300 000 people that expect results. Everybody gets their results via snail mail as well, but there is a significant portion that, like me, want to get the results as quickly as possible.

So the dam gates opened and around 100 000 people waited to see their results. Result? Massive DDoS. The funny thing is that it happens every year and that the web page is not really meant for massive storms of visitors.

Enough talking. You want to know the results of my application? I successfully logged in after manually entering the address of the auth server, and from a low-level HTML dump that I extracted I got what can be summarized in the following:

“Antagen”

Before you English-speakers go out to find this in a dictionary (which happily will tell you that it literally means “assumed”) I can give you the service of telling that it means that I got in to my #1 education, “Civilingenjör i teknisk fysik och elektroteknik – internationell, inr tyska”, roughly “Master of Science in technical physics and electrotechnology, German direction”. Together with me there are three people of the four appliciants that got accepted to the education. 100% guys.

I am moving to Linköping in a few weeks and will spend the majority of the five upcoming years in that city. You are all invited to my graduation party in June…2012!