Penetration testing, anti-DDoS protection and administrative care for the organizer of one of the largest lotteries on the Polish Internet, "7 Cars x Budda"
For the organizer of one of the largest lotteries on the Polish Internet, "7 Cars x Budda," we implemented anti-DDoS solutions, conducted penetration tests and provided 24/7 administrative support, ensuring that participation in the lottery and the live drawing itself went smoothly and without disruption.
Challenge
"7 Cars x Budda" is an ebook sales campaign with a promotional sweepstakes element, launched in November 2023 by popular YouTuber Budda, who specializes in automobiles and car tuning. His online activities are followed by 2.2 million subscribers.
During the campaign's finale, on January 14, 2024, seven tuned cars from BMW, Mercedes, Audi and Toyota, worth a total of 2.5 million zlotys, were drawn. Participation in the lottery involved the purchase of e-books, for the purchase of which free lottery tickets were awarded. The "7 Cars x Budda" raffle attracted attention not only for the value of the cars to be won, but also for other attractive prizes, including PlayStation 5 consoles, gaming laptops and iPhone 15s - a total of 36 prizes.
At its peak, the broadcast of the lottery finale, available on Budd.TV's YouTube channel and on the creator's Instagram, was followed by nearly 698,000 people, which is expected to be a record on the Polish Internet.
As such actions do not happen often on the web, Influi Publishing House, which was the organizer of the event, asked us to properly secure the IT infrastructure so that everything would run smoothly, safely and without disruption.
Solutions
Hostersi performed penetration testing, identifying potential vulnerabilities in the infrastructure's security, and implemented a strategy to protect against DDoS attacks, implementing and configuring the CloudFlare tool, which was crucial to repel real-time attacks and ensure continuity in the purchase of ebooks and printing of tickets in a dedicated draw machine. Hostersi specialists also provided round-the-clock administrative support for the aforementioned project, whose infrastructure was designed in Amazon Web Services. Our administrators monitored and maintained the lottery systems, ensuring their performance, scalability and security. Throughout the event, a dedicated Hostersi team provided LIVE monitoring and responded to any security incidents in real time.
Traffic on the frontend during the action finale reached a total of nearly 250M requests, and 26M during the most sensitive 15-minute spike.
On the backend, the same traffic is already "only" about 530k requests.
The first spike was a large attack blocked by CloudFlare even before the event started. Later, at the start of the event, there was a big spike in interest in the site around 4 pm, as well as the standard one at the very end of the event. From time to time, there were smaller attacks that didn't have a major impact on the infrastructure, and the entire lottery went off without a hitch.
Summary
Thanks to the penetration tests conducted, the anti-DDoS protection strategies implemented and the 24/7 administrative care, we minimized the risks of security vulnerabilities in the systems running during the "7 Cars x Budda" campaign, making Influi Publishing's infrastructure more resistant to attacks and ensuring the lottery's uninterrupted business continuity.
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