Ustream Hit By Major DDoS Attack

Ustream was shut down by DDoS attackers who were out to get a citizen journalist.  This is yet another in a large number of politicallly motivated DDoS attacks.  Ustream is a top tier site, streaming terabytes of content every day, and yet they were vulnerable.  Be sure not to make their mistakes, and always have a plan in place.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57430997-83/ustream-outage-due-to-ddos-aimed-at-citizen-journalist/

“We are 100 percent confident that they were targeting a specific channel on Ustream of a Russian citizen journalist. This is the third time in the last six months that a specific Russian citizen journalist was directly targeted through this complex and highly adaptive attack,” Brad Hunstable, co-founder and CEO of Ustream said in a phone interview from Budapest. “We get DDoS attacks all the time and we fight them off. It’s not a big deal. But this is adaptive beyond anything we’ve seen.”

Asia Becoming a Hotspot of DDoS Attacks

As home and mobile internet is becoming more common in parts of Asia, we’re seeing a dramatic rise in DDoS attacks there. It’s going to be more of an issue as time goes on, as people are attacking not just personal and corporate sites, but are now going after the governments. A few countries are looking to ban the tools that are being used, but even that may not be adequate. For the moment the attacks aren’t being directed towards the west, but that may change over time.  Make sure you’re protected.

http://www.zdnetasia.com/asia-hotspot-for-ddos-attacks-but-no-need-to-overreact-62304777.htm

DDoS is becoming the “most popular” method in Asia for hackers to enact their political and emotional motivations, he added. Hackers in Asia are no longer “script kiddies” who get thrills from hacking, but using it against government and companies for a cause, he noted.

 

Malaysian Stock Exchange Taken Down By DDoS Attack

Bursa Malaysia was taken down by a major DDoS Attack. They recovered, but the damage was already done. This comes after we’ve already seen similar attacks on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, the Saudi Stock Exchange and the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange. No site is invulnerable, make sure you’re protected. Give us a call to talk about your options.

http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=23421

Having issued an initial statement blaming the site’s unavailability on “heavy network congestion” the stock exchange later confirmed a DDoS attack was responsible for “intermittent access” on Monday evening.

The site is now back up and running while “other systems were not affected during the incident and trading in its securities, derivatives and Islamic markets continue to operate normally”.

Metered Vs Unmetered Servers

When shopping for a dedicated server you’re going to have a few choices to make. Windows, Linux or FreeBSD? How much RAM? What CPU? But you also have to think about bandwidth. In order to serve websites (or files, or anything else) you need to have an adequate network connection.

You have 2 major things to consider when it comes to your connection. You have the speed, the number of megabits (or gigabits) per second that the connection can handle. And then you have the total amount of data which you are allowed to send per month. You can choose between a metered network connection, which caps the total amount of data you can send, or an unmetered connection, which allows you an unlimited amount. Metered connections are generally more affordable, and occasionally faster, but if you go over your limit you will be cut off or charged per gigabyte. Unmetetered connections are generally more expensive, but allow you to transfer an unlimited amount.

Think of it like a cell phone plan. If you know you’re only going to use 200 minutes per month, there’s no reason to get a premium plan with more than that. But if you often need a huge number of minutes, it’s worth going for an unlimited plan.

So make your decision based on how much strain you think will be put on your server. You can always start off on a metered server and switch to an unmetered server later. Check out staminus.net for our latest deals, there are specials for both metered and unmetered servers that are ready to go today.

 

Anonymous Takes Down CISPA Supporters

The political collective “Anonymous” have a new target in their sites: supporters of CISPA bill. CISPA is effectively the new version of SOPA, which drew a lot of negative attention from internet users when it tried to impose specific government and copyright holder controls over online content. Anonymous is using DDoS attacks as a way of disrupting the activities of the supporters. Whichever side you’re on, you need to make sure that your business is protected from the rise of attacks. Give us a call today to get set up with the best DDoS protection in the industry.

Source:
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/anonymous-knocks-cispa-supporters-offline-041112

Huge Spike of DDoS Attacks in Q1 2012

The first quarter of 2012 has seen more DDoS attacks than all of 2011. This is a bad sign for anyone with a website at risk. DDoS, short of Distributed Denial of Service, attacks involve using a large number of computers to access a single site repeatedly, effectively using up all of it’s available resources and blocking legitimate users.  And it’s not just for political purposes, many malicious hackers are using botnets to DDoS attack major sites as a distraction to hide their attempts to bypass the server’s security.

This is an issue that’s not going to go away. Protect your site now before it’s too late. Adding DDoS protection to your site can be a painless experience, contact us today and we’ll walk you through the process.

 

Source:
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/bad-bots-ddos-attacks-spike-in-first-quarter-outdoing-all-of-2011.ars?clicked=related_right

HostingCon 2012!

Staminus will be attending HostingCon 2012 in Boston.  We will be in booth #530.  We’re going to have free massages, drinks, and gifts.  Come visit us!

DDoS Attacks on the Rise

As tracked by SecureList: http://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792221/DDoS_attacks_in_H2_2011

Attacks were up by 20% in the second half of 2011, and have been on the rise since then.  Don’t wait until your server is already compromised and you’re losing customers.  Take preventative measures and start looking at your options.

DDoS Protection / Mitigation Upgrade

The History:
Over the past ten years, common ddos attacks have been in the range of several million packets per second.  These attacks have been handled nicely by our distributed firewalls with capacity up to about 10 million packets per second.  Our generation ii mitigation system revolutionized ddos protection by being the first to integrate automated inline non-intrusive dynamically-scalable security.

The Problem:
Over the past six months, we have seen an increase in attacks that exceed 10 million packets per second, going as high as about 40 million packets per second.  These attacks mostly seem to originate from areas outside the United States.  They are extremely potent and often long-lasting.  Our systems have been unable to cope with these via traditional methods.

The Solution:
About six months ago, we began testing our generation iii mitigation system, anticipating that these attacks would eventually become the norm.  Our generation iii mitigation system, including our advanced mitigation platform SecurePort, has undergone extensive performance, stability and scalability testing.  The system is capable of performing up to about 60 million packets per second with no impact to customer traffic.

This is an important metric for customers.  A 10 Gbps circuit, with overhead, is capable of receiving about 15 million packets per second.  Currently, we have four 10 Gbps circuits.  This means we are effectively capable of mitigation ddos attacks at line rate!

The Implementation:
Over the past four weeks, we have been making network changes to integrate our generation iii security system.  During this transition phase, we continued to encounter massive ddos attacks that may have impacted the network for brief periods of time.  It is important to note that none of the changes we made resulted in this.  Our network changes were non-intrusive.

The final stages of this network integration and migration will be taking place today and tomorrow.  With the integration of this new system, Staminus will have one of the largest single node ddos protection deployments in the world.

We look forward to protecting you!

Happy Valentines Day from Staminus.net

Show your server some love! Today is a great time to upgrade to DDoS protection, before it’s too late. It’s not always better to have loved and lost your data, than to never have loved at all.