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.

Comments

What do they do?

[BlindSpy]

What does this company do and if there "different hardware" deffence is so good, why'd they get attacked?

MacOS classic?

[bluethundr]

I've often wondered how a Mac running Classic on a beefy box as a server would stand up to an attemp to h4x0r it. To really get at it, seems to me you would have to get to the base underpinnings of the OS on some level. Which are arcane and hard to master, even (I'm told) to seasoned Mac programmers.

Not that I'm implying that it would be invulnerable to some attacks (like DDOS) but surely it seems that many of your other bases would be covered.

Speeking of... ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

[TubeSteak]

I was going to ask what i thought was a n00b question: "wtf is ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a reference to?" but then i searched around a little and came up with this. Turns out it's not so n00bish a question & that there's a bunch of history.

So now i finally get all those /. comments that didn't seem to make sense.