Amazon hit with DDoS attack Wednesday

UltraDNS, the DNS provider for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Northern California, briefly went offline Thursday due to a reported Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Specifically, their S3 cloud storage service was unreachable from about 5:43 pm to 6:38 pm Pacific Time. While the service itself continued to operate, users in that area received DNS resolution errors.

AWS quickly bounced back from the attack and indicated that they had everything under control.

“At 7:45 p.m. Eastern Time we noticed an abnormal spike in queries and immediately identified it as a DDoS attack,” said Allen Goldberg, vice president of corporate communications at Neustar, in an e-mail.

“We had everything under control well under an hour. The attack was limited to Northern California Internet users,” he said.

One of the concerns raised about cloud computing, of which Amazon.com is a major provider, is whether it can be reliable to business customers who need their services to stay live as much as possible. Proponents would argue that companies like Amazon.com are better prepared for such strikes and are thus able to recover more quickly than the average business with its own internal web applications.

Source: Flickr
Photo: Flickr

Avoid disaster with DDoS protection

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are an unfortunate fact of life on the web. These attacks can be hard to stop once they occur, but did you know many dedicated server hosts provide protection against them?

This service usually takes the form of a firewall or dedicated proxy, and can be costly. Popular websites are prime targets, however, and if your site generates enough income to justify the expense, DDoS protection is well worth the money.

Some attacks are so advanced they can bypass preventive methods. These are less common and are generally used on mega-sites like Twitter, though. If anything, be sure your host provides good customer service. A responsive support team is often the best method for fighting a DDoS attack.

Chinese Police Detain Four Internet Hackers

On May 19, China experienced widespread Internet outages after hackers took down major DNS servers in a DoS (Denial of Service) attack. Chinese authorities now have the four hackers in custody following police investigations in the Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guandong provinces. The server in question was DNSPod, a Chinese DNS service provider and domain name registrar.

The motive for the attacks was apparently over a bitter rivalry between two illegal online gaming companies. DNSPod provides access to some of the competition’s gaming servers, and the suspects figured it was an easy way to redirect traffic to their own gaming sites. But the effects of the attacks were widespread, causing other servers to go down, including those of Baofeng, a popular Chinese video streaming service. Millions of users were denied service.

Nearly 300 million Internet users in China temporarily lost service, the worst outage since 2006, according to the the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. A DoS attack relies on unsecured computers to do its dirty work, infiltrating them and then using their Internet connections to send useless packets of data to a server until the server’s resources are completely used, denying real customers service.
Source: Top Tech News
Photo: Flickr

DDos Attacks on the Rise

Over the last six months, Internet security experts have observed an increase in Distributed Denial of Service of Attacks (DDos).

DDoS attacks occur when an attacker uses a large number of compromised computers to send tiny pieces of data, often as small as a 52-byte ping, to a server. So many data packets are sent that the system is overwhelmed, causing it to crash. DDoS is a popular way for hackers to take out websites and web services such as online gaming, banking, and even domain name servers.

Cloud computing provider GoGrid.com was hit by such an attack in March, leaving half of its customers without service for several days. Last month, American server provider The Planet and Brazilian ISP Telefonica were both hit by DDoS attacks. Both companies’ customers were severely affected.

The increase in attacks is the result of an underlying weakness in the Internet. Because of the way many data centers are set up, all their servers rely on as few as two DNS servers. These servers are responsible for routing domain names to websites and, if attacked, can stop thousands of sites from functioning.

Via: The Washington Post