On the night of May 5th to 6th, HyperSwap was hit by a massive DDoS attack that impacted both their website and application. As HyperSwap was already using some of our cloud solutions, we quickly stepped in to support them migrating their front-end and redirecting the attack traffic to mitigate its effects.
TL;DR
- Implemented a custom anti-DDoS solution
- Our team reacted immediately
- Aleph Cloud services remained fully operational
HyperSwap’s infrastructure initially lacked a proxy and did not have sufficient protection against DDoS attacks. However, they had deployed a fallback version of their application via IPFS, pinned on our network, in case their main servers were compromised.
Unfortunately, on the night of the attack, HyperSwap’s main server was overwhelmed. While the API remained live, its performance degraded significantly. Their team redirected traffic to our network in an emergency move, which caused some turbulence before we could fully respond.
Meanwhile, our dev team activated our internal anti-DDoS system, offloading attack traffic to a black hole and stabilizing the situation.
The Aleph team quickly stepped in to support us by ensuring the IPFS-hosted version was accessible, allowing users to continue accessing the app while we worked on mitigation. At the same time, the Imperator team, with their experience in indexing and handling high-throughput environments, acted swiftly and effectively. They immediately understood the situation and deployed the necessary resources to counter the attack, setting up new proxies, implementing alert systems, and reinforcing our infrastructure. —
On our side, we helped the HyperSwap team migrate their website to our internal anti-DDoS platform and redirected the attack to a black hole. This incident marked the first successful deployment of Aleph Cloud’s experimental anti-DDoS solution, developed to protect decentralized applications from targeted disruptions.
What Is a Remotely-Triggered Black Hole (RTBH)?
RTBH filtering is a network security technique used to mitigate DDoS attacks by redirecting malicious traffic to a null route, effectively making it disappear. Think of RTBH as a trapdoor at your network’s entrance: when a flood of harmful traffic is detected, RTBH diverts it into this black hole, preventing it from reaching or slowing down the network and its users.
What’s Next?
HyperSwap plans to deploy their APIs on Aleph Cloud to create a fully decentralized version of their application, one that’s resilient to future attacks.
We will continue to develop and improve our anti-DDoS solution, which proved effective in this real-world test. This successful mitigation highlights the power of decentralized infrastructure to deliver security, resilience, and true censorship resistance.
