Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a key component of Internet routing and is responsible for exchanging information on how Autonomous Systems (ASes) can reach one another. When BGP issues occur, inter-network traffic can be affected, from packet loss and latency to complete loss of connectivity. This makes BGP an important…
The ThousandEyes team spent several days last week at Interop monitoring the health of InteropNet, the volunteer-built network that powers the conference. We set out to instrument InteropNet in order to monitor the health of services used by conference attendees and vendors
Continuing our discussion about visualizing DDoS attacks from last week, today we are going to look at an attack against a multinational bank. Whereas last week’s example focused on path visualization, this week’s will touch upon how Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) plays a role in rerouting traffic during an attack.
DDoS attacks come in many shapes and sizes, making mitigation difficult and complex. The general gist is to overwhelm the infrastructure of the target — whether routers, bandwidth, DNS or application servers. Importantly, DDoS attacks can target both application and network layers.
On August 15th 2013 a DDoS attack targeted github.com. ThousandEyes was monitoring GitHub through public agents before and during the attack and we captured the coordinated effort by GitHub, Rackspace and their ISPs to fend off the attack. While multiple ISPs were involved in the effort, for the sake of…