Piryx, a non-partisan site that hopes to build out a platform for political fundraising, says the DDoS attack began at 3:12pm CST Friday and was finally brought under control at 1:45am CST Saturday.
The company writes via email:
Yesterday (Friday) around 3:12pm CST we noticed the bandwidth spike on the downstream connections to Piryx.com server collocation facility. Our bandwidth and packet rate threshold monitors went off and we saw both traditional DOS bandwidth based attacks as well as very high packet rate, low bandwidth ICMP floods all destined for our IP address.
...At this point we have spent 40+ man hours, with 10 external techs fully monopolized in researching and mitigating this attack.
To give a sense of scale, the attacks were sending us 500+ Mbps of traffic, which would run about $147,500 per month in bandwidth overages.
Such attacks are relatively hard to defend against: recent DDoS attacks against major social media sites brought down Twitter and slowed Facebook to a crawl.
In this case a motive is easy to speculate upon: Wilson had received $200,000 in donations on Piryx as of Friday morning...recent reports claim his fundraising total has now exceeded $1 million.