Partial outage yesterday due to DDoS attack

ChinaWe had sporadic website outages throughout yesterday due to a large and extremely distributed denial of service attack largely originating from China Telecom.

Starting at 9:51 AM CT we started receiving spoofed TCP connection requests.  During the attack we were receiving 99.87% invalid connections requests.  The attack was aimed at our web server firewall and load balancer chains.  The  high volume of invalid connections prevented services from responding to many valid requests.  While we have equipment to mitigate these types of attacks the sheer volume of connections being established overwhelmed the hardware designed to prevent this type of attack and which are critical in providing web services.  We eventually mitigated this attack and greatly increased our capacity for this path through our network.  We are working with our vendors further increase our capacity for this type of attack.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our users.

Derek

10 Comments

  1. Christian Banks on September 8, 2010 at 5:09 pm

    yea sorry that was me…

    jk.

    cool you got it fixed. I was always wondering about DDoS attacks..
    So is upgrading your hardware the only thing you can do to defend against them?
    That’s a bummer if so..



  2. Ly on September 8, 2010 at 10:20 pm

    I don’t know why but i can’t connect to mediafire. I live in VietNam and my friends can’t connect too.



    • derek on September 9, 2010 at 1:19 pm

      This was probably due to some changes made to mitigate the DDoS, is it still happening for you?



  3. Tri Nguyen on September 9, 2010 at 2:58 am

    How was the problem guys? Is it resolved? I still can’t access Mediafire.



    • derek on September 9, 2010 at 1:19 pm

      Are you still having trouble?



  4. Ben on September 9, 2010 at 1:42 pm

    to hell with china.



  5. Brainjunk on September 10, 2010 at 6:13 pm

    I still having a trouble uploading, before it finishes it does restarts again and again.



  6. Tau khua on January 31, 2011 at 11:56 pm

    I dont know why China DDOS Mediafire. I think mediafire is a best services

    Bọn Tàu Khựa Chó.



  7. ChiChi on March 15, 2011 at 7:40 am

    someone from China DDoS mediafire, not China



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