The Hackers Who Tracked My Sleep Cycle

This is a short story about how I caught hackers timing their attacks around my daily routine. A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of the night, I got alerts on my phone that various metrics were going haywire. The only thing I noticed was a huge spike in sign-ups. This coincided with one of my articles being on the front page of Hacker News, so I didn't think much of it. It had spiked for a few hours and flattened out just before I started troubleshooting, so I went back to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, a few thousand more accounts had appeared. I thought this was a bit suspicious, but ... even if someone was being naughty, they seemed to have given up. Nothing else was out of the ordinary that day. I even decided to stay up later that night to see if the pattern would repeat. Nothing. As a small precaution, I activated CAPTCHA to slow down the sign-ups and went back to sleep. The next morning, you guessed it... same pattern. This time, I decided to do a deep dive into the