Website Downtime

[Andrew Harris]

Hello,

It has become apparent that the datacenter is presently undergoing a very large DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, rendering ATXHS websites inaccessible. As far as I know, this is not targeting us specifically. I will be watching the datacenter's updates and I will relay more information as it becomes available.

[Andrew Harris]

evil.badthin.gs is now responsive on the network on all IPs. Still looking for further updates from the datacenter.

[Andrew Harris]

The datacenter has confirmed that the attack has been mitigated, and more details will be forthcoming. I'll share any new info with the atxhs-networking group.

For anyone who cares, attached is the bandwidth graph for our uplink that shows 2 hours of no traffic. I will be requesting downtime credit from the DC accordingly.

[Andrew Harris]

This is what I got from the DC as an explanation of the attack. Clearly damage control copypasta, but nice that they followed up with me with more detail about it. 20 Gb, jesus.

Thank you for your patience while we prepared this report. At approximately 5:52PM EDT on September 30th, 2013, a very large scale DDoS attack of over 20GBit in size was targeted at our data center. This attack overloaded one of our core distribution switches, causing a portion of our data center to lose network connectivity. Immediately, our on-site network engineers began work to mitigate the attack and return the downed distribution router to a working state. Sadly, due to the size and span of the distributed attack, the DDOS mitigation took longer then expected

As part of our quality assurance commitment to our clients, our senior management and network engineers had an emergency meeting to go over all of the data gathered during the outage. We have internal proprietary tools in place which study all inbound DDOS attacks. While we weather DDoS attacks almost daily, 95% of them do not affect us due to the fact our network is always in a "study" mode and set up to learn and become immune to them. Unfortunately, the size and type of this attack was unique; however, it is now learned by our systems to be able to combat it and attacks like it in the future.

As always, we want to assure you, our valued partner, that we take every down time, no matter the cause or circumstance, as seriously as possible and understand the far-reaching effects they have. We do not take the choice you have made in choosing our services lightly, and consider it an honor that you have placed your trust in us as your data center partner. We hope you see this notice as a continuation of that recognition and know that we truly do care about you, our valued partner.

Thank you for your time reading this notice and please do let us know should you have any further questions or concerns. Also, please feel free to share this with any parties you feel necessary. It is not considered a confidential notice of any sorts.