A Real Test: Testomato and a DDoS

On Monday, hackers attacked some of the most prominent online Czech news websites, including: iDNES.cz, iHNED.cz, and Novinky.cz.

The websites were flooded with thousands of digital requests, which overloaded their servers, causing their homepages to slow or completely crash.

“News servers have been facing a massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack since 8:30am (0730 GMT),” iDNES announced on its Facebook profile.

By noon (1100 GMT), both iDNES and iHNED were back up and running.

But there’s more to this story…

In the Wikidi office, the Testomato team was just starting its morning off with some fresh coffee, when one of our developers noticed something strange.

One of the sample websites he was running test case suites on was showing very strange results. iDNES.cz was returning errors for almost every page in the basic suite because their load time kept timing out.

As the websites started to officially announce the DDoS, our team was already aware of the problem and watching Testomato do exactly what it was designed to do: detect real-life problems outside the code. 

We are very proud that Testomato has the capability of identifying issues like a DDoS. It means in the future, we will be able to alert our own users about similar types of attacks and help them with problems caused by hackers.

Although, this type of attack is not very sophisticated, it can block users from accessing websites. For some, this could come with costly consequences.

See the original screenshot below:

Here is the screenshot after iDNES got back online:

Have you ever been hacked? Or had your website crash due to overload?Tell us about it below or on Facebook. You can also tweet us directly @testomatocom.