Another Day, Another DoS
Let’s face it – the world tends to be a very hostile environment and the internet is not much different. From viruses and trojans to distruption of service attacks – it happens all day every day and it is only a matter of time before it affects you. I have personally dealt with two DoS attacks in the last two weeks and both for very different reasons although the end result is about the same.
Last week the DDoS, or distributed disruption of service, attack was motivated entirely by financial gain for the attacker. The attacker had previously attacked another hosting company called A Small Orange and had attempted to extort $7,000 from the company to stop the attack. ASO did not bow to the demands of the attacker and simply worked to filter out the attack and return service to their customers. While some of ASO’s customers were not satisfied, many times when a provider is put in this situation there is not much that can be done.
The attacker moved on from ASO to my company and sent a message to our sales department informing us that we were next. The attack began about an hour later and peaked at about 4.5GBPS which is enough to bring down most small data centers in their entirety however our data center SoftLayer Dallas was able to filter out the attack within 10 minutes to restore full service. The attacker subsequently moved on to their next target which was VectorLevel who was hosted with Colo4Dallas at the time. The attack at VectorLevel brought Colo4Dallas to it’s knees until the attack was null-routed at C4D’s upstream provider. At the time of this writing Colo4Dallas’ web site was unreachable and as such I am not directly linking to it. Continue reading
I will start this post by saying that I have used Apache for more than 2 years in production environments and I am quite experienced at optimizing Apache to accomplish the goal at hand should it be handling thousands of connections simultaneously to serving dynamic web sites quickly and efficiently while minimizing the memory footprint.
We have had several clients submit tickets saying things such as “My site is loading slowly or not at all” and in my testing I have found that it is difficult to make connections across the country depending on what backbone your internet service provider is using. It seems that Level3 and RoadRunner are having some trouble with the amount of traffic being transferred across their backbones where as I am seeing beautiful performance out of the Comcast backbone myself.
As an entrepreneur I very much understand the importance of networking with other individuals and companies in my industry. Many people that try to start a business tend to operate in a very introverted way which often prevents them from making the networking connections that would be beneficial to their business in the long run. Many fear that discussing their business with others in the same industry may open them up to issues where private company information is divulged but I have found that not to be an issue. Individuals in the same industry can often discuss common issues that affect the industry and work together to resolve these issues faster than they could on their own.
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