January 3, 2006 Distributed Denial of Service Attack on Resource Library Internet Servers

January 3, 2006 Distributed Denial of Service Attack on Resource Library Internet Servers

Dear Readers,

On January 3, 2006 the TFAO website which contains Resource Library experienced an eight hour service interruption. Fortunately this was the only interruption of service since the founding of this publication. Following are excerpts of a January 4, 2005 letter sent by the firm that hosts TFAO's website regarding the service interruption.

Dear Customer,

As you may know, ReadyHosting experienced a service interruption

yesterday, and we are writing to express our apologies for any

issues you may have encountered. We realize that you depend on us

to provide reliable Web hosting and e-mail solutions, and we

understand the serious impact these types of interruptions have.

It is important to us that you understand what caused this and

what we are doing to prevent similar situations in the future.

Early Tuesday morning, ReadyHosting's servers became the target

of a sophisticated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

DDoS attacks are malicious attempts to interrupt Internet

services by intentionally "flooding" and overwhelming providers

with bogus data. Once the volume of this data exceeds an

architecture's capacity, systems can no longer perform their

tasks and performance issues occur. (If you'd like to learn more,

Google "DDoS attacks" or "DNS storms.")

The attack damaged a key router in our hosting architecture. The

router has since been repaired, and we were able to fully restore

both Web and e-mail services yesterday afternoon.

Unfortunately, DDoS attacks are not uncommon, and Internet

criminals are constantly discovering new ways to disrupt

services. Please be assured that we are working with federal

authorities to identify those responsible for the attack and

prevent any type of future disruption.

This attack was not in any way related to the upcoming transition

to the new hosting platform. In fact, the new hosting platform

was designed specifically to prevent these kinds of service

interruptions.

The most significant advantage of the new platform is that it

will support your site and e-mail through dozens of servers

simultaneously. With this distributed architecture, the new

platform is fully redundant -- should a router or other key piece

of hardware come under attack, there will be additional machines

to support your Web site and e-mail.

Sincerely,

The ReadyHosting Team

Resource Library is pleased that ReadyHosting is taking steps to prevent a reoccurrence of this problem. We strive to bring to you, our readers, the best in service and will watch closely the mitigation steps being taken to prevent such attacks in the future.

Best regards,

John Hazeltine

Editor

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