Synthetic Monitoring
What happens if you upset the wrong party on the internet ?
Background:
A 300Gbps distributed DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, thought to be the largest in the world so far, happened between March 18 and March 26 affecting the internet performance mainly across Europe.
During the last week we noticed a DDoS attack that started with approximately 10Gbps of traffic mostly from open DNS recursors. Then on March 19, the attack increased to approximately 90Gbps. Later the attackers changed their strategy, moving up the backbone Tier-1 network suppliers and generating up to 300Gbps of traffic between networks. This created congestion across several major internet exchanges, resulting in a slower internet performance clearly noticeable here in Europe.
As stated by Patrick Gilmore, chief architect at Akamai Technologies to the NY Times, this was the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet.
Depending on your Internet or Cloud providers network setup, your website might have been affected by this traffic congestion, although most of our customers did not have any service outages this time.Thinking ahead though, I recommend that your strategy for online presence and online advertising needs to take into consideration the ability to handle traffic peaks and DDoS attacks if you happen to upset somebody on the internet with the ammunition and knowhow to attack you. Based on this latest happenings the ability to detect and deflect malicious traffic should definitely be on your checklist together with my previous advice on best practices found here
Regards
Mike
Mike Howse [email protected]
VP International
London, UK
office: +44 (0)1628 440826
Cell: +44 (0)7770 568524