Durante los doce días transcurridos entre el 25 de diciembre y el 5 de enero, Linode sufrió más de un centenar de ataques de denegación de servicio contra todas las partes importantes de nuestra infraestructura, algunos de los cuales interrumpieron gravemente el servicio para cientos de miles de clientes de Linode . Me gustaría continuar con mi anterior actualización proporcionando algo más de información sobre cómo fuimos atacados y qué estamos haciendo para evitar que vuelva a ocurrir.
Esencialmente, el atacante subió por nuestra pila más o menos en este orden:
- Ataques de capa 7 ("400 Bad Request") contra nuestros sitios web públicos
- Ataques volumétricos contra nuestros sitios web, servidores de nombres autorizados y otros servicios públicos
- Ataques volumétricos contra la infraestructura de la red Linode
- Ataques volumétricos hacia la infraestructura de red de nuestro proveedor de colocación
La mayoría de los ataques eran simples ataques volumétricos. Un ataque volumétrico es el tipo más común de ataque de denegación de servicio distribuido (DDoS) en el que se dirige un cañón de tráfico basura hacia una dirección IP, eliminando a la víctima prevista de Internet. Es el equivalente virtual a provocar intencionadamente un atasco utilizando una flota de coches de alquiler, y la omnipresencia de este tipo de ataques ha causado cientos de miles de millones de dólares en pérdidas económicas a nivel mundial.
Normalmente, Linode ve varias docenas de ataques volumétricos dirigidos a nuestros clientes cada día. Sin embargo, estos ataques casi nunca afectan a la red más amplia de Linode debido a una herramienta que utilizamos para protegernos llamada blackholing desencadenado a distancia. Cuando una dirección IP es "blackholed", Internet se pone de acuerdo colectivamente para eliminar todo el tráfico destinado a esa dirección IP, impidiendo que tanto el tráfico bueno como el malo llegue a ella. Para redes de contenido como Linode, que tienen cientos de miles de IP, el blackholing es un arma contundente pero crucial en nuestro arsenal, que nos da la capacidad de "cortar un dedo para salvar la mano", es decir, sacrificar al cliente que está siendo atacado para mantener a los demás en línea.
El "blackholing" falla como mitigador efectivo en una circunstancia obvia pero importante: cuando la IP que está siendo atacada -digamos, alguna pieza crítica de la infraestructura- no puede quedar fuera de línea sin que otros caigan con ella. Los ejemplos que suelen venir a la mente son los "servidores de servidores", como los puntos finales de API o los servidores DNS, que constituyen la base de otras infraestructuras. Aunque muchos de los ataques iban dirigidos a nuestros "servidores de servidores", los más difíciles de mitigar para nosotros resultaron ser los ataques dirigidos directamente a nuestra infraestructura de red y a la de nuestros proveedores de colocación.
Direcciones secundarias
Los ataques dirigidos contra nuestra infraestructura de red eran relativamente sencillos, pero mitigarlos no lo era. Como un artefacto de la historia, segmentamos a los clientes en subredes /24 individuales, lo que significa que nuestros routers deben tener una dirección IP "secundaria" dentro de cada una de estas subredes para que los clientes la utilicen como su puerta de entrada a la red.
Con el paso del tiempo, nuestros routers han acumulado cientos de estas direcciones secundarias, cada una de ellas un objetivo potencial de ataque. Por supuesto, esta no ha sido la primera vez que nuestros routers han sido atacados directamente. Normalmente, se toman medidas especiales para enviar anuncios de agujeros negros a nuestros upstreams sin que se produzcan agujeros negros en nuestro núcleo, lo que detiene el ataque y permite que el tráfico de los clientes pase como de costumbre. Sin embargo, no estábamos preparados para el escenario en el que alguien atacaba rápida e imprevisiblemente muchas docenas de IPs secundarias diferentes en nuestros routers. Esto se debió a un par de razones. En primer lugar, la mitigación de los ataques a los equipos de red requería la intervención manual de los ingenieros de red, lo que era lento y propenso a errores. En segundo lugar, nuestros proveedores de acceso sólo podían aceptar un número limitado de anuncios de agujeros negros para limitar el potencial de daños en caso de error.
Después de varios días de jugar al gato y al ratón con el atacante, pudimos trabajar con nuestros proveedores de colocación para que nos hicieran un agujero negro en todas nuestras direcciones secundarias, o para que dejaran caer el tráfico en los bordes de las redes de sus proveedores de tránsito, donde el agujero negro no era posible.
Conexiones cruzadas
Los ataques dirigidos a nuestros proveedores de colocación fueron igual de sencillos, pero aún más difíciles de mitigar. Una vez que nuestros routers ya no podían ser atacados directamente, nuestros socios de colocación y sus proveedores de tránsito se convirtieron en el siguiente objetivo lógico, concretamente sus conexiones cruzadas. Una conexión cruzada puede considerarse generalmente como el enlace físico entre dos routers cualquiera en Internet. Cada lado de este enlace físico necesita una dirección IP para que los dos routers puedan comunicarse entre sí, y fueron esas direcciones IP las que fueron atacadas.
Como en el caso de nuestra propia infraestructura, este método de ataque no era novedoso en sí mismo. Lo que hizo que este método fuera tan eficaz fue la rapidez e imprevisibilidad de los ataques. En muchos de nuestros centros de datos, se atacaron docenas de IPs diferentes dentro de las redes ascendentes, lo que requirió un nivel de concentración y coordinación entre nuestros socios de colocación y sus proveedores de tránsito que fue difícil de mantener. Nuestra interrupción más larga con diferencia -más de 30 horas en Atlanta- puede atribuirse directamente a las frecuentes interrupciones de la comunicación entre el personal de Linode y personas que a veces estaban a cuatro grados de distancia de nosotros. Finalmente, pudimos cerrar por completo este vector de ataque después de que algunos proveedores de transporte obstinados reconocieran finalmente que su infraestructura estaba siendo atacada y pusieran en marcha con éxito medidas para detener los ataques.
Lecciones aprendidas
A nivel personal, nos sentimos avergonzados de que algo así haya podido ocurrir, y hemos aprendido algunas duras lecciones de la experiencia.
Primera lección: no depender de intermediarios En retrospectiva, creemos que las largas interrupciones podrían haberse evitado si no hubiéramos dependido de nuestros socios de colocación para el tránsito de IP. Hay dos razones concretas para ello: En primer lugar, en varias ocasiones se nos hizo creer que nuestros proveedores de colocación simplemente tenían más capacidad de tránsito IP de la que realmente tenían. En varias ocasiones, la cantidad de tráfico de ataque dirigido a Linode fue tan grande que nuestros proveedores de colocación no tuvieron más remedio que desempatar temporalmente con la red Linode hasta que los ataques terminaron. En segundo lugar, para mitigar con éxito algunos de los ataques más complejos fue necesaria la participación directa de ingenieros de red de alto nivel de diferentes proveedores de primer nivel. A las 4 de la mañana de un fin de semana festivo, nuestros socios de colocación se convirtieron en una barrera adicional e innecesaria entre nosotros y las personas que podían solucionar nuestros problemas.
Segunda lección: absorber los ataques más grandes La estrategia de gestión de la capacidad de Linodepara el tránsito IP ha sido sencilla: cuando nuestro pico de utilización diaria empieza a acercarse al 50% de nuestra capacidad total, es el momento de conseguir más enlaces. Esta estrategia es estándar para las redes de operadores, pero ahora entendemos que es inadecuada para redes de contenido como la nuestra. Para poner algunos números reales en esto, nuestras redes de centros de datos más pequeñas tienen una capacidad total de tránsito IP de 40Gbps. Esto puede parecer mucha capacidad para muchos de ustedes, pero en el contexto de un DDoS de 80Gbps que no puede ser bloqueado, tener sólo 20Gbps de espacio libre nos deja con una pérdida de paquetes paralizante durante la duración del ataque.
Tercera lección: informar a los clientes de lo que ocurre Es importante que reconozcamos cuando fallamos, y nuestra falta de comunicación detallada durante los primeros días del ataque fue un gran fallo. Proporcionar actualizaciones técnicas detalladas durante un momento de crisis sólo puede ser realizado por aquellos que tienen un conocimiento detallado del estado actual de las cosas. Por lo general, esas personas son también las que están luchando contra el fuego. Después de que las cosas se calmaran y revisáramos nuestras comunicaciones públicas, llegamos a la conclusión de que nuestro miedo a redactar algo mal y causar un pánico indebido nos llevó a hablar de forma más ambigua de lo que debíamos en nuestras actualizaciones de estado. Esto fue un error, y a partir de ahora, una persona técnica designada será responsable de comunicar en detalle durante eventos importantes como este. Además, nuestra página de estado permite ahora a los clientes recibir alertas sobre problemas de servicio por correo electrónico y mensajes de texto SMS a través del enlace "Suscribirse a las actualizaciones".
Nuestro futuro es más brillante que nuestro pasado
Con estas lecciones en mente, nos gustaría que supieras cómo las estamos poniendo en práctica. En primer lugar, la parte fácil: hemos mitigado la amenaza de ataques contra nuestros servidores de cara al público implementando la mitigación de DDoS. Nuestros servidores de nombres están ahora protegidos por Cloudflare, y nuestros sitios web están ahora protegidos por potentes dispositivos comerciales de depuración de tráfico. Además, nos hemos asegurado de que las técnicas de mitigación de emergencia puestas en marcha durante estos ataques navideños sean permanentes.
Por sí solas, estas medidas nos sitúan en un lugar en el que confiamos en que los tipos de ataques que se produjeron durante las fiestas no puedan volver a producirse. Sin embargo, tenemos que hacer más. Así que hoy me complace anunciar que Linode va a revisar toda la estrategia de conectividad de nuestros centros de datos, con una red de 200 gigabits de tránsito y capacidad de interconexión desde los principales puntos regionales de presencia en cada una de nuestras ubicaciones.
A continuación se presenta una visión general de las próximas mejoras de infraestructura en nuestro centro de datos de Newark, que será el primero en recibir estas actualizaciones de capacidad.
El elemento principal de esta arquitectura son las redes de transporte óptico que ya hemos empezado a construir. Estas redes proporcionarán rutas totalmente diversificadas a algunos de los PdP más importantes de la región, dando a Linode acceso a cientos de opciones de operadores diferentes y a miles de socios de peering directos. En comparación con nuestra arquitectura actual, las ventajas de esta actualización son evidentes. Vamos a tomar el control de toda nuestra infraestructura, hasta el mismo borde de Internet. Esto significa que, en lugar de depender de intermediarios para el tránsito de IP, estaremos en asociación directa con los operadores de los que dependemos para el servicio.
Además, Linode quintuplicará la cantidad de ancho de banda de la que disponemos actualmente, lo que nos permitirá absorber ataques DDoS extremadamente grandes hasta que se mitiguen adecuadamente. A medida que el tamaño de los ataques aumente en el futuro, esta arquitectura se ampliará rápidamente para satisfacer sus demandas sin necesidad de nuevas inversiones de capital.
Palabras finales
Por último, hay que pedir disculpas sinceras. Como empresa que aloja infraestructura crítica para nuestros clientes, se nos confía la responsabilidad de mantener esa infraestructura en línea. Esperamos que la transparencia y la visión de futuro de este post puedan recuperar parte de esa confianza. También nos gustaría agradecerles sus amables palabras de comprensión y apoyo. Muchos de nosotros hemos visto arruinadas nuestras vacaciones por estos implacables ataques, y es algo difícil de explicar a nuestros seres queridos. El apoyo de la comunidad ha sido de gran ayuda. Os animamos a publicar vuestras preguntas o comentarios a continuación.
Comentarios (67)
Thanks for your great work. My VPS was running well during these days.
Good postmortem analysis – thanks for being candid.
Thanks for being honest and forthcoming about this and the issues you addressed-both on the technical and PR sides-as well as the steps you are taking to better your company.
Kimo.
You people are awesome and have great stamina. We are satisfied customer from Pakistan.
I’ll never stop buying linodes!!
You guys are are rock stars in my book, and I appreciate the transparency. More tech companies need to live and breath that these days, or else find themselves losing the game to cheaper competitors.
While I haven’t been a fan of how some past incidents were handled, I still give Linode a 5-star rating. Good job!
Things happen. Those of us who network or sysadmin know that when youre fighting fires and figuring out what is going on and fielding calls from angry clients the last thing you have time for is updating everyone. Hell…you may not even know what all is going on for a couple days or more with huge attacks.
This is a good postmortem and your ability to learn and adapt and invest in your own infrastructure is why I love and continue to be a Linode fanatic.
Keep it up you guys. Sorry Christmas was such a bummer.
May the Network be with you!
Can’t thank the Linode team enough for your dedication. The livelyhood of thousands rest in your hands, I feel like this whole event further proves how well qualified you guys are to be doing what you’re doing.
The only part of this that really bothers me is the idea that if I get a DDOS, Linode is just going to blackhole me, and me alone. Doesn’t that mean that I have to give in to ransom demands from attackers?
I really appreciate this. We were waiting for this to take the decision if we will stay in linode or move away, and we are staying.
I strongly agree that being more transparent would have helped a LOT.
I’d like to know, though, when is scheduled the above change in the rest of the datacenters. I’m not using newark right now and would like to know when my datacenter will have it : )
Thanks a lot,
Rodrigo
@Mogden – for people who are attacked regularly, we suggest Cloudflare or others in the DDoS protection market. I’m not sure what the future holds on this subject, but rest assured that it really bothers us too.
Thanks for the update. Any time frame for other datacenters to be updated? My linodes are in Atlanta and we suffered almost three days of downtime.
Cheers
We had 2 linodes, one of them in Atlanta datacenter. We have not experience any issues during holidays, but I was worried though. Thanks for the explanation and amazing work. Honestly hope your family can understand the situation.
Amazing company!
Like Rodrigo, this is a huge thing to us. I was honestly feeling that it was going the usual corporate way with silence and deniability, just waiting for the furore to die down. It really makes a difference to hear not only the details of the response/mitigation activities, which we appreciate, but also acknowledgement of the position we were put into when communication was sparse.
It goes a long way.
Thanks again.
Mark.
Great to hear we could help you get protected.
swiner@cloudflare.com
@mogden – if your the one being ddos’d then you deserve to be blackholed. I dont pay for my linodes for you to be targetted with a ddos and mine linodes taken down!!
Thank you for the analysis and a break down of what took place, and most importantly, thank you for being honest with customers!
Cheers!
I’m obviously a huge fan of Linode, but I wonder if this attack will force them to re-evaluate their “3 strikes” policy towards hosted sites which come under DDoS attack. As this attack should have taught them, it’s indiscriminate, and there’s not a whole lot a small website owner can do to mitigate it. We rely on Linode to be able to deal with this, and punishing the victim is hardly a fair solution.
And attacks started minutes after posting updates. http://status.linode.com/incidents/mkcgnmjmnnln
I’ve a message for Linode especially Chris, please invest more and more on infrastructure if you want to stay in the game otherwise, you’ll be overtaken by heavily funded startups in this domain. We know you have innovative mind and excellent technology but this alone is not sufficient for you to win in this domain. I like performance and flexibility of Linode but moved to DO just because I needed to setup my stuff at Japan and Singapore data-centers and Japan DC is sold out. 3 out of 6 locations are sold out and you are not yet expanding? How will you compete?
Come out of your box and look at your neighbors. It was painful to move to Digital Ocean for me but I had to take this decision. I am still using Linode for some of my stuff will continue using it until I need redundancy or you expand.
There’s nothing that I love more than the amount of technical detail that you provide to us on these cases, and even with some minor updates.
I love being a Linode customer, no DDoS will get that away from me 😀
Thanks for this post, Alex. This was a rough period for everyone involved and affected but I am extremely impressed by Linode making the effort to hopefully prevent the same scenario from happening again.
There were many lessons to be learned from this – both for Linode and for customers.
Linode appears to have realized what they needed to do and that is fantastic. Instead of saying sh*t happens and going about business as usual you are actively working to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Well done.
We (customers) need to cover our own bases too. For anything critical or even slightly important you need to have a plan in place in the event of a Linode outage (regardless of the reason).
I have now split some of my services and are far better placed to recover quickly in the event something like this were to happen again. Linode had always been so reliable that I got complacent. Lesson definitely learned.
In my case my costs have now increased as I am now paying other providers in addition to what I have and will continue to pay Linode, but the ability to keep some important services online is worth it.
Thank you to everyone at Linode for your hard work and for looking out for your customers.
Some of our big clients suffered with the downtime on those days but, with several VPS and more online each day, we never accepted any offer from others players. This kind of behaviour make us confident with the team and give us peace of mind that we’re in good hands.
Thank you for the update and respect with your customers.
Hostcare Internet
Thank you for being open, good luck with your new defences and I hope that you catch up on your family time!
Linode user here. Thanks for the transparency. I wasn’t directly affected but I appreciate the openness on the issue. It’s a welcome change to most companies now. I plan to keep using Linode just because of how cool you all handled the situation. Keep up the good work!
Cloudflare will probably help with your DDoS but they aren’t infallible as any other vendor.. But what happens when they get hit really hard themselves? I’d recommend getting a second DNS provider.
See Also: https://blog.thousandeyes.com/ultradns-ddos-affects-major-web-services/
https://blog.thousandeyes.com/ultradns-outage-october-2015/
I was beginning to wonder if such a note would arrive. The explanation is useful and I’m feeling as though things are safer than before.
Thank you for being transparent about what happened. That was a truly hellish attack. Getting slammed with a sophisticated and highly targeted 80 Gbit DDoS is stressful for any network admin and I’m glad that Linode succeeded in weathering the storm.
I am really impressed with way you have handled this whole situation, your company’s honesty and explanation is more than anyone could have expected. I’m sure there were many hours invested, not only in locating and fixing the problem on top of adding the double protection; but even in your letter to your customers. I hope all your customers are as loyal to your company as you have been with them. Way to step up your game, keep up the good work. Wishes for much more success……
Thank you very much for the detailed breakdown of what went wrong and what you plan to do to prevent this in the future. I have to say though, technical reasons and justifications aside, Linode has a lot to learn in regards to communication. I know you acknowledge that in your blog post but for many people (myself included) it’s too little way too late. It’s taken you 30 days to write a blog post that could’ve been written in hours. For 30 days people have been sitting on the fence wondering exactly what you guys are doing and whether or not they should jump ship. For many people (myself included), the absence of this response and the overall feeling that it has been so long since you said you were going to provide an update, that honestly you were just going to push this to the side and hope it went away, has directly contributed to Linode losing a significant amount of business from us.
I don’t want my response to turn into some Linode bashing post, but I want you to be aware that your failure to provide sufficient information and responses is the biggest problem here – for me, at least. It hit your reputation hard and caused us to lose a significant amount of trust in your company and services. DDoS attacks happen, and we know you guys were working extremely hard to deal with those. You reminded us often enough in your status updates. What we really wanted to know was that the worst was over and that you identified your weaknesses and were addressing those. The longer we had to wait for this information, the less trust we had/have in you.
I’d like to end this on a more positive note. All of the above said, your services are fantastic overall and I’d love to come back to Linode in the future, once you’ve performed all of the changes you have mentioned here. Just please, improve on your communications!
Long-time Linode customer…I wasn’t affected by the outage, but I’m really glad you’ve taken the time to write up what happened. Thanks for being transparent and generally awesome.
Alex, this caught my attention: “… requiring a level of focus and coordination between our colocation partners and their transit providers which was difficult to maintain.”
How did you structure this communication? What tools / technologies did you use or tried to use?
This is a nicely put article. I only have amazing things to say about Linode and its staff. Awesome post!
As a long time customer and a fellow network administrator I just wanted to say that I do really appreciate all your hard work. Respect.
Sounds an exciting project Alex, good luck!
Any news on continued security farces at Linode? and ‘The Best Practices not invented here’ approach.. For example to reset 2FA
—
Should you need us to disable your Two-Factor Authentication, the following information is required:
An image of the front and back of the payment card on file, which clearly shows both the last 6 digits and owner of the card.
An image of the front and back of the matching government-issued photo ID.
—
A) Photoshop CC in 2 mins, you have no idea what my CC should look like.
B) You can’t verify government ID so say 5 minute photoshop.
Woohoo for 2FA, known as 2 f… alls
Thanks for the update, and letting us know that things will be better handled in the future. Both technically and on the communication front.
Any idea who attacked and why?
Linode – you are the best. Thanks for your service.
Thanks for the update. As a long time linode customer, it is appreciated.
For you guys complaining about being kicked out in case of a DDoS, I recommend getting DDoS protection for your linodes. There are a lot of cheap options right there that can be integrated easily.
Some one recommended CloudFlare and they are great. You can also look at Sucuri:
http://sucuri.net/website-firewall/
Or Incapsula:
https://incapsula.com
Both great products and solutions. Stay safe!
200g? this years ddos was 800gbps…
good postmortem. now can you explain what happened with the “leaked” credentials and the fact that we had to reset the passwords.
thank you
These attacks could happen to anyone and any provider. Keep up the good work!
Great article and the right way to handle these kinds of problems. Transparency and constructive retros are the way to go.
I think you did great job considering the size of the attack. That’s why continue to use Linode for my virtual machines. Thank you for your support and keep up the good work.
Thank you for the clear and concise explanation. I look forward to you rolling out your upgrades and continue to be a happy customer with Linode.
Cisco routers, seriously?
Juniper high end routers take a gigantic steaming dump all over Cisco.
@Jake that’s essentially what ASRs are 😉
If you want to do it on the cheap side and be safe, get some cheaper / best equipment from huawei (give them a call). You might think the Chinese cannot be better than Cisco, but Cisco is now also made in China. Also I’m sorry, but you need some Ddos protection (expensive). You cannot just nullroute your costumers… you have to protect them. If the cheap OVH company can do it, why can’t you…
Looks like you guys need to hire someone with real experience in network engineering (worked at ISP level), not just some cheap undergraduate out of university.
You need to rely more on anycast, have reserved capacity, etc.
After reading this, I would not host my sites on linode. You guys look amateur (sorry).
I appreciate this honest insight, but I’ve moved back to a local server since these attacks made access to my Linode difficult or impossible, and always-on, always-accessible was my main reason for moving to Linode in the first place. Sorry, and better luck in the future.
I like the transparency, even delayed. I like that you’re taking steps. I DON’T like that your “security appliances” block ALL ICMP packets including the “Packet Too Big” messages required for path MTU discovery and breaking my ability to access the Manager over my VPN.
Buying blended internet direct from your colo provider is a bad idea (as it seems you have learned the hardway)
You should be getting your transit direct from diverse carriers… this is networking 101
Love the armchair quarterbacks giving their input. Now, for you QBs, where is your massive company you are running and making decisions and learning lessons from? Oh you don’t have one and you don’t work for one? Sit back and let Linode do their job, they are by far the best provider out there. The cost of this type of infrastructure is gigantic and you wanna-be QBs have no idea what it takes to run a business.
Great job Linode. I know I’ve made the right choice by using you.
Excellent. I knew you guys were “on it”. I really appreciate the detail you provided.
Thank you for releasing this honest and detailed report
Regarding CloudFlare, did you shop around for any other DNS DDOS protection services? The reason I ask is because CloudFlare happily caches too many dodgy websites. Some sources that may be of interest:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2015/10/12/certificate-authorities-issue-hundreds-of-deceptive-ssl-certificates-to-fraudsters.html (large number of phishing certificates issued by CloudFlare)
http://www.crimeflare.com (non-profit that investigates CloudFlare and its customers)
I appreciate the update, but i find a bit late too.
Also i don’t really get why Mr. Forster signing this post?
And don’t get me wrong, i have nothing against him, i don’t doubt his intentions or knowledge.
But i expected a statement from someone from the top of the food chain . This was also one of my main problems when the events happened, its like nobody cares from the top management, until one of the engineers realized that they can’t be silent anymore.
I still have that feeling, and is pretty alarming .
It’s time to move to IPv6-only internet. Attacking a single address will become impractical if a host can have millions of them changed automatically in an unpredictable way.
Appreciate the info.
It is a minor point, I know, but status.linode.com should either be un-available over https, or have its own cert.
try this in chrome…
https://status.linode.com
Thanks Linode Team for acknowledging your challenges, and courageously taking adaptive actions 🙂
Great job! Didn’t know such a story ongoing since my site was on all the time. Really appreciate all the hard work of LINODE support team!
Thank you for the very interesting update. Best of luck for the future.
I’m also quite curious on who could benefit from such attacks in the first place.
I am using Cloud Flare to protect the blog from DDOS attack, is there any other best application available to replace cloudflare? Is there a way to stop the DDOS or brute force attack for wordpress sites?
Great write up & good to see such honesty and transparency. I think it is important for readers of this to understand that DDoS attacks can affect anyone at any time on any host. Obviously when you are on the receiving end of a nullroute it is not nice, but It’s important to note though that providers do not want for you to have downtime, but if a DDoS directed at you is affecting other customers and you don’t have some form of mitigation, there is seldom any other option than to take this action. As they said, ‘cut off a finger to save the hand’. I’m quite sure that if someone else is being DDoS’d that you would prefer to see them nullrouted than have your own service impacted, so that has to work both ways in my eyes.
It’s important to look at the issue objectively – DDoS attacks are not going to go away and really if you have concerns around protection then this does mean paying for a mitigation service, especially if outages will be more costly than the monthly sub.
@Srinivas – You’ll need a CloudFlare business plan for DDoS attack mitigation. Simply being behind CloudFlare on a free plan won’t give you this protection, and there isn’t another service that I am aware of that provides free DDoS protection without at least having some other paid service. Keep in mind that CloudFlare isn’t an application, but rather a service which is totally separate from your Wordpress sites. If you want to run something locally to stop a brute force attack then have a look at a plugin such as Wordfence, which is very effective. Another good plugin is iQ Block Country which uses GeoLocation – you can lock down your back end to whitelisted countries only. Plugins are not infallible, but they definitely add extra security. Another good way to stop brute force attacks is by not using obvious account names for the administration area of your site…lots of tools will try to brute force on usernames like ‘admin’ – as with any security approach, it’s all about the layers!
As a final note, I do always find it interesting when posts like this attract the critics who dish out ‘advice’ about how X and Y should have already been done, or that they are amateur, etc. I would like to know which fairytale jobs they have at companies that have everything 100% perfect with 100% uptime and 0% chance of outages or attacks…
Fair play Linode, tip of the cap.
Thank you for your honesty and transparency. Very very good post. Thank you for your hard work during the attacks even on holidays. Keep pushing Linode Team!
yeah thank you also for your transparency. I remember what happened, evthg gave tears and I think, as many people, we planned to move to another company. Even some days ago, I compared with AWS, reading their doc for RDS, EC2, ELB, S3 etc, but Linode, even with much less available options and possibilities if we compare to amazon, Linode stay for us a better company, with a great support and reactive, providing faster and cheaper solutions.
I started with Linode 4 years ago, I loved the service and I am not going to go away from you guys. I know how painful firefighting could be, thanks to your team for working so hard. And please do everything that could prevent this from repeating.
Hello,
on the article you said following
“our nameservers are now protected by Cloudflare, and our websites are now protected by powerful commercial traffic scrubbing appliances.”
but seems it is not anymore. did you moved away from cloudflare protection? if yes then why? many hosting giants now rely on cloudflare protection.
Thank you for this update and the recent additional high memory and $5 options.