Last week Rostelecom, one of Russia’s largest, partially state-owned Internet service providers, leaked dozens of routes pertaining to IP addresses that belong to major financial services firms. This route leak redirected Internet traffic bound for these financial firms to Rostelcom, as some routers around the Internet decided that the new, leaked routes were preferable to the legitimate ones. … Read More »
On Tuesday, February 28th, 2017, the US-East-1 region of Amazon Web Services S3 saw a complete outage from 9:40am to 12:36pm PST. AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a cloud object storage solution that many services rely on to store and retrieve files from anywhere on the web. In addition, many other AWS services that depend on S3 – Elastic Load Balancers, Redshift data warehouse, Relational Database Service and others – also had limited to no functionality. … Read More »
As we sip on warm holiday beverages and gradually wind down the year, it’s rather customary to reflect on the past and contemplate the future. Following traditions, we took a stroll down memory lane analyzing the state of the Internet and the “cloud”. In today’s blog post we discuss some of the most impactful outages of 2016, understand common trends and evaluate some of the key learnings.… Read More »
As explained in our recent blog post, The DDoS Attack on Dyn’s DNS Infrastructure, a large-scale DDoS attack took down a good chunk of the Internet on the morning of Friday, October 21st. It was a very busy morning for anyone involved with website reliability and network operations in any of the hundreds of businesses that were, in one way or another, impacted by the outage.… Read More »
On Friday, October 21st, a series of large-scale DDoS attacks were launched against Dyn, a managed DNS provider. Over the course of 18 hours, these attacks disrupted many critical services–including Spotify, Amazon and HBO Now–all of whom are customers of Dyn. At the height of the attack, approximately 75% of our global vantage points sent queries that went unanswered by Dyn’s servers.… Read More »
On July 6, 2016, Pokémon GO, the augmented reality gaming phenomenon, launched in the United States, and millions became Pokémon trainers with the dream to “catch’ em all.” By July 7, Pokémon GO was the most downloaded and top-grossing game in the United States. At the time of this writing, the GPS-based game had generated $35 million in revenue from 30 million downloads. … Read More »
On June 25, 2016, all 13 DNS root servers suffered from a major distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. This wasn’t the first time in recent memory that attacks were aimed at critical DNS infrastructure — at the end of last year, several root servers came under a DDoS attack, and in mid-May NS1 also experienced a DDoS attack that brought down services like Yelp and Alexa. … Read More »
On May 16th, 2016, NS1, a DNS and traffic management vendor, was a victim of a widespread DDoS attack that affected a number of prominent websites and services, including Yelp and Alexa. The DDoS attack was broadly targeted at NS1, affecting their DNS infrastructure, the hosting provider of their website and other online-facing assets.… Read More »
On May 17th 2016, we started seeing a string of network and BGP routing issues that were spread across continents. A deeper look revealed correlated behaviour resulting from possible mishaps in the SEA-ME-WE 4 (SMW-4) submarine communications cable affecting Tata Communications and Telecom Italia Sparkle (TISparkle).… Read More »
In previous posts, we’ve explored many of the pieces that make up China’s vast system of censorship, including the Great Firewall, a huge content-filtering machine, and the Great Cannon, a powerful new DDoS weapon. But that’s just one side of the story—just as Chinese censorship has evolved over time, so too have the methods to evade it. … Read More »