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This work provides an overview of the July & August of 2023 DDoS attacks against the Archive of Our Own from the perspective of the OTW’s Systems Committee. As such, it may include some technical terms and information. We’ll do our best to explain or link to external resources to help provide some context as needed. We will focus on the series of events for which we have data & evidence, rather than speculation. All times & dates are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and in 24 hour format unless otherwise stated.
As a reminder, the Systems Committee consists of 8 volunteers (6 at the time of the incident) who donate their free time to maintaining the OTW infrastructure. The events outlined below were fit in during our day jobs, evenings and night times.
The OTW infrastructure consists of multiple servers & networking devices with differing roles. In order to understand how the attack affected us, we’ll need to briefly explain a few of these layers.
