Comments | substitute: why LJ blew up the other day

substitute

why LJ blew up the other day

May 04, 2006 00:39

someone else decided to make their problem into Six Apart's problem ( Read more... )

denialofservice, jerks, commerce, lj, morons, no, spam, denialofsausage, owmygibson, villainy

Comments 7

IT HAVE A ERROR mendel May 4 2006, 13:39:56 UTC

That page isn't loading, and Google and Coral caches don't have it -- what's the story?

Re: IT HAVE A ERROR substitute May 4 2006, 19:35:08 UTC

Odd, it's loading for me now still.

Short version: Blue Security is a company that "solves" the problem of spam via DDOS. This causes a DDOS slapfight with spammers. Blue Security hosts their blog on Typepad. When their site goes down due to the attacks they switch DNS so everything points to their blog. Result: Six Apart gets DDOS'd.

Re: IT HAVE A ERROR mendel May 4 2006, 23:37:18 UTC

Yeah, sorry, it started working again an hour or two after I commented.

springheel_jack May 4 2006, 14:43:52 UTC

So the attack really automatically followed the domain redirect instead of just pounding away at the IP address directly? How's that? I find it a little confusing that such a defense would actually, well, work. Unless 6A was actually targeted by the spammers for some reason. But I don't know much about this stuff.

travisd May 4 2006, 14:48:20 UTC

Well, it used to be common for DDoS attacks to use IP addresses, and the victim would just move the site to a new IP address. My resolving DNS and using that you get to follow them around when they move, and also target distributed sites as well (same hostname resolves to multiple IP's for redundancy/load-balancing).

So let me get this straight... vanmojo May 4 2006, 15:44:08 UTC

In order for Blue Security to defend itself from a DDoS attack, they simply put their shields up and deflected the attack on to a third party? It's like Obi Wan Kenobi going: "these are not the droids your looking for... no, the droids your looking for are over there. That guy has them. And you should hear what he said about your clone-mom..."
Unfortunately for me, Six Apart probably alreday has good attorneys.

Because I would retire on that one...

And btw, I really like the Archie the Cockroach icon...

mojo sends

gcrumb May 5 2006, 03:33:17 UTC

By 'pinky' you mean baby finger, right?

While I agree that it would be nice to have the option to chop off another in the future, I would still argue for an alternate, er... broader definition of pinky in cases like this.