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Akamai: How They Fought Recent DDoS Attacks
yootje writes "Infoworld is running an interesting article about Akamai and the DDoS attack that hit the network of Akamai Tuesday. According to this article one of the defenses of Akamai is the big diversity of their hardware: 'We deliberately use different operating systems, different name server implementations, different kinds of routers, different kinds of switches, different kinds of CPUs, and especially, different operational procedures.' So says Paul Vixie, architect of BIND and president of the ITC." Yootje points to another article on this subject as well, this one at Internetnews.com. Update: 07/07 19:38 GMT by T : Note that Vixie's quote here is actually presented out of context; he was commenting by way of contrast on the diversity of the root DNS servers, not Akamai's content-serving system.
Akamai claims over 1,100 customers and indicated that only 2 percent of them were noticeably impacted by the attack, such as not being available for about an hour.
Theo only statistic they ofer is the percentage of customers that were impacted. To me this hints of trying to play down the severity of the situation. When only 2 percent of your customers comprise (following is is a made up statistic since they didn't give me one) 80 percent of your traffic, you're lying by omission by only giving customer statistics.
In the case of the Akamai incident, the vulnerable service was DNS. Paul Vixie, architect of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) and president of the Internet Systems Consortium, charged that Akamai's proprietary approach to DNS makes it a single point of failure. He added that the 13 DNS root servers, which weathered a vicious DDoS attack in 2002, are even more defensible today than they were back then. The root servers are resilient, Vixie said, because their operators embrace diversity. "We deliberately use different operating systems, different name server implementations, different kinds of routers, different kinds of switches, different kinds of CPUs, and especially, different operational procedures," Vixie told Internetnews.com.
He's not talking about how great Akamai is. He's talking about how great everyone else is.
On another note: What the heck does this story have to do with Akamai operators fighting DDoS attacks? They more than likely sat with their thumbs up their rears contemplating how having such a structured and inflexible DNS system could possibly be in err.