Popular cloud hosting provider Linode reported a series of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) that caused several disruptions in locations scattered across the world in the final week of 2015.
The DDoS attacks caused multiple service interruptions to critical DNS infrastructure and data center locations around the world. Locations include cities in the US and UK such as Dallas, Atlanta, Newark, New Jersey and Freemont in California. Other locations include Frankurt, Tokyo and Singapore.
The DDoS attacks commenced on Christmas day and Linode quickly moved to mitigate connectivity issues caused due to the attacks upon discovery. The DDoS attacks occurred merely days after a major scheduled maintenance drive by the company on Xen Linode host server.
Linode published an update on the recent DDoS attacks on its status page. It read:
I am one of several network engineers at Linode who have been working around the clock on DDoS mitigation. While things are stable, I would like to take a moment to publicly address the large and frequent DDoS attacks that we have been receiving since Christmas Day.
It has become evident in the past two days that a bad actor is purchasing large amounts of botnet capacity in an attempt to significantly damage Linode’s business.
The author also notes that the attacks occurred multiple times. Over the course of the final week in December, the Linode engineer counts at least 30 different attacks of “significant duration and impact.” The downside of quickly mitigating such attacks are that the attack vectors used to trigger the DDoS attacks inevitably change.
Related read: Donald Trump Campaign Website Suffers DDoS Attack
Data centers and cloud hosting services routinely experience DDoS attacks and they can be notoriously hard to mitigate. There is little room for error and a dearth of time at hand due to a large customer base dependent on the hosting provider’s services on a real-time basis. Essentially, a DDoS attack on a data center or hosting provider can be significantly disruptive. A single massive DDoS attack even against a single provider can lead to a domino effect stemming from latency issues and the degradation of services. Fundamentally, it has all the trappings of a long-lasting service outage, as evident in the case of Linode who are still resolving their connectivity issues around the world.
Image credit: Imgur.
