Massive Denial of Service Attack

Here are the facts, our network was hit with a series of massive DDoS attacks this weekend.  More accurately it was one continuing attack that caused customer impact four times:

• Friday, May 8th, 12:55 am to 1:30 am
• Friday, May 8th, 2:50 pm to 3:15 pm
• Saturday, May 9th, 11:20 pm to 11:40 pm
• Sunday, May 10th, 1:45 pm to 2:45 pm

Each instance of the attack was caused by inbound flood of traffic aimed at one of our customers.  This resulted in dropped packets and lack of service to several network segments.

The customer that was attacked already knows that they were the target.  If you did not hear from us over the weekend, you were not the intended victim, just an innocent bystander.

Each attack was slightly different and our network team worked quickly as possible to bring the flood under control.  At one point over 10,000 network hosts were involved, so it took some doing to gain the upper hand.

DDoS is inescapable, it will continue to happen as long as there are bad people out there looking to take out a rival, whether another business or someone broadcasting a point of view they disagree with.  Searching for Denial of Service you will find thousands of recent examples of companies small and big reporting that they were targeted by such an attack. All major name brand companies, banks, telecoms and service providers have been impacted.  This is not avoidable because someone somewhere has the will and the means to break through any countermeasure.  Recently, even a DDoS remediation service was overwhelmed by an attack which was hundreds of gigabits in size.

However, every problem is also an opportunity.  Our current DDoS remediation is being adapted to meet the challenges of the evolving threat.  We already began the process of expanding our network and putting more automated countermeasures to ensure that the DDoS ends before a single person is notified.  We’re going to fight computers with computers.

Lastly, we are going to improve our communication during such events.  There was a lag between the service impacting event and the notification to our end users.  Without proper communication the end users only see a network slowdown or outage without the awareness that we are working nonstop to fix it.  So the perception of what we are doing does not match the urgency and seriousness of how we are treating the situation and this can add frustration to an already emotionally charged situation.  Any future service disruptions will be immediately reported to our social media feeds and timely updates will be pushed out.

These new procedures and hardware will take some time to integrate into our systems and workflow, but the processes have already begun and will result in better quality of service almost immediately.  We thank you for being an eBoundHost customer and look forward to hearing your feedback.

Artur May 11, 2015