SDF Punted, Due to DDOS

bullshizzle writes "The longest running Public Access UNIX System (SDF, running BSD) est. 1989 had their services terminated abruptly by NWLink because of a DDoS attack. Termination was carried out immediately without prior notification, which violates their contract (page1, page2). Complaints can be filed to the Washington State Attorney General's Office by filling out this simple form conveniently located online. You can follow the story at lonestar.org." While still bad, I've been corrected - SDF was *not* the longest running public access Unix - ArborNet (Located right here in my town) has been around for at least a number more years.

Comments

Their forum

[Some Bitch]

They have a temporary forum for discussion (top comment atm is about making the front page at /.).

Re:Easy to get rid of a company you don't like

[innate]

Doug Palin, owner of NWLink, posted his explanation to the Lonestar message board (I won't Slashdot it, you can find it yourself).

NWLink (aka Pacifier aka Europa) has tens of thousands of customers here in the Northwest, including me, and the DoS effectively shut down their entire customer base -- 3 times over the past 3 weeks.

Either they were going to get complaints from one customer, lonestar.org, or they were going to get complaints from thousands of other customers (many of whom they had to pay monetary damages to make up for the loss of service). I can put up with my Internet access being cut off once, twice, but the 3rd time it happens I'm going to seriously consider switching providers. NWLink did what they had to do to save most of their customer base.

Re:Sorry Won't Fly.

[innate]

Northwest Link has this to say:

Posted to SDF message board by the owner of NWLink:

For starters let me say that I fully support SDF and what they are doing
as a long time net user and admin of public access unix boxes. Having been
the victim of multiple attacks over the past 15 years I know how much of a
pain they are.

Over the past 3 weeks SDF has been attacked 3 times that we can document,
we believe that one more network related issue was directed towards them
as well but we were not able track down the destination while it was occurring.

Yesterday morning as in the other events we shut down SDFs port and had the
IP blocked at each of our backbone providers (UUNet, Verio %26 ELI). This effectively
shutdown our entire customer base while the Distributed Denial of Service attack was
under way and until we had the ip blocked. During and Following these attacks we
receive notice from our large line customers that have Quality of Service provisions
in their contracts that they want credits.

These credits are somewhat substantial and which we are contractually obligated to
provide. We have issued over $30K in credits over the past 3 weeks when these attacks
occur. This coupled with the customers that cancel because of their inability to
use the service they are paying for has caused more then a little harm to my business.

Steven has full access to the equipment at this time, we are not holding it hostage
as the webpage page maintains. In fact we suggested he go to Semaphore directly, this
is where we have our network equipment in Seattle. This was following a move on Thursday
from our old Bellevue location. He acknowledged to me in a phone call a few minutes ago
that he is working with them to get a contract signed. It is going to cost more, however
I suspect the price that he is paying to them is more then fair for his bandwidth usage.
What NWlink was charging was an excellent deal for the bandwidth being used.

Steven explained to me that he was quite surprised by the direction this had taken when
I spoke to him a short time ago. He knew what we did and why we did it. I to am sorry
to see any customer go but had no choice in this matter to keep our other customers
functional who pay the bills and salarys of my staff.

Doug Palin
CEO

Re:You're missing the point

[dpalin]

SDF was involved each and every time these events occurred. There were a 3 different attacks in 3 weeks. There was a 4th attack that was short lived that we were not able to confirm was directed at SDF. What course of action would have been more realistic when 12 million packets per second started hitting our network? We took the action we could. I would have loved to have kept SDF as a customer. However had this continued I would have explaining to do to other customers (which I spent most of yesterday doing following the attack). Doug Palin CEO - NWLink