How the Dyn outage affected Cloudflare

Last Friday the popular DNS service Dyn suffered three waves of DDoS attacks that affected users first on the East Coast of the US, and later users worldwide. Popular websites, some of which are also Cloudflare customers, were inaccessible. Although Cloudflare was not attacked, joint Dyn/Cloudflare customers were affected.

Almost as soon as Dyn came under attack we noticed a sudden jump in DNS errors on our edge machines and alerted our SRE and support teams that Dyn was in trouble. Support was ready to help joint customers and we began looking in detail at the effect the Dyn outage was having on our systems.

An immediate concern internally was that since our DNS servers were unable to reach Dyn they would be consuming resources waiting on timeouts and retrying. The first question I asked the DNS team was: “Are we seeing increased DNS response latency?” rapidly followed by “If this gets worse are we likely to?”. Happily, the response to both those questions (after the team analyzed the situation) was no.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by tracyshaun

However, that didn’t mean we had nothing to do. Operating a large scale system like Cloudflare that Continue reading

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DDoS attack overwhelmed Dyn despite mitigation efforts

Dyn says that the DDoS attack that swamped its DNS resolution service last week was backed by far fewer internet of things (IoT) devices than it thought before. Previously it said it was hit by traffic from tens of millions of IP addresses, some of which were likely spoofed, making the actual number of bots involved far fewer. “We are still working on analyzing the data but the estimate at the time of this report is up to 100,000 malicious endpoints,” the company says in a status update. The attacks, which knocked out access to some high-profile Web sites, threw as many packets at Dyn’s infrastructure as it could and the company responded with its own mitigation actions as well as cooperation from upstream internet providers who blocked some of the attack flow. “These techniques included traffic-shaping incoming traffic, rebalancing of that traffic by manipulation of [DNS querying] anycast policies, application of internal filtering and deployment of scrubbing services,” the company says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DDoS attack overwhelmed Dyn despite mitigation efforts

Dyn says that the DDoS attack that swamped its DNS resolution service last week was backed by far fewer internet of things (IoT) devices than it thought before. Previously it said it was hit by traffic from tens of millions of IP addresses, some of which were likely spoofed, making the actual number of bots involved far fewer. “We are still working on analyzing the data but the estimate at the time of this report is up to 100,000 malicious endpoints,” the company says in a status update. The attacks, which knocked out access to some high-profile Web sites, threw as many packets at Dyn’s infrastructure as it could and the company responded with its own mitigation actions as well as cooperation from upstream internet providers who blocked some of the attack flow. “These techniques included traffic-shaping incoming traffic, rebalancing of that traffic by manipulation of [DNS querying] anycast policies, application of internal filtering and deployment of scrubbing services,” the company says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Lessons learned from the DYN attack

Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not promote a product or service and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.The large scale DDoS attack on DYN last week interrupted access to many major web sites, and while the specifics of the attack have been widely analyzed, here are the important lessons learned:* DDoS attacks are alive and well: A few years ago DDoS attacks were hot news, but reports died down as the focus shifted to news about social engineering attacks, large scale data breachs and insider trading schemes. DDoS attacks seemed like yesterday’s risk but they are very much alive and well.  In fact, they are back and stronger than ever.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lessons learned from the DYN attack

Lessons learned from the DYN attack

Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not promote a product or service and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.The large scale DDoS attack on DYN last week interrupted access to many major web sites, and while the specifics of the attack have been widely analyzed, here are the important lessons learned:* DDoS attacks are alive and well: A few years ago DDoS attacks were hot news, but reports died down as the focus shifted to news about social engineering attacks, large scale data breachs and insider trading schemes. DDoS attacks seemed like yesterday’s risk but they are very much alive and well.  In fact, they are back and stronger than ever.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here