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

I R 0wn j00

[pythro]

It didn7 w0rk. Ph33r.

first post

[Anonymous Coward]

first post

Never heard of syn cookies or what?

[XMichael]

I guess Akamai never heard of Syn Cookies? Yes you need to build them into your kernel, and for whatever reason, there not enabled by default... but seriously, Akamai...

Security Cameras

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.

A stable version of BIND

[Offwhite98]

I wish I could get a stable version of BIND. I am running a recent release and I still have to run a cron job to make sure it is running and restart it when it randomly dies. I use to be able to look at the logs to determine what was wrong, but it seems the current version fails to provide the useful information.

So I have been looking into alteratives like TinyDNS. I still have much to read, but I would like to discover more documentation and more alteratives. Ultimately I would like to be able to manage the DNS zones in a MySQL database. I can then tunnel into the server with SSH and run the MySQL Control Center to edit database records.

Any suggestions?

Re:YOU REDUNDANT PIECE OF SHIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no! He posted a similar comment one whole minute after the other guy. He must be a plagarizererer, let's form a lynch mob and get him!!!!

Response to computer security by JabberKatz(tm)

[Anonymous Coward]

Borsook's "Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through The Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech" is published by O'Reilly ($US24), one of the largest info-tainmnent conglomerates on the planet. It's the stepchild of post-war progress in farming, slaughtering, packing, refrigeration, and transportation.

For several years now, federal law enforcement agencies and a private threat-evaluation security firm have teamed up to develop a genetic map indicating which components of this genetic material determine certain human traits, from depression to disease to susceptibility to addiction to eye color or artistic ability.

The institutions of the outside world are thundering online like a great frenzied herd. And they're dinosaurs, fading relics of another time.

Rebel code helped end the Microsoft Age by focusing attention on the impact of the Net like Jonathan Postel. Millions of kids informing on millions of other kids, as is often true of sex and scandal, the press has been full of Armageddon-like reports about the end of World War II, and TV has become an unprecedently significant focal point for many competing interests -- corporations, fans, some artists -- all grappling with intellectual property and other kinds of virtual communities. However, they were given short shrift amidst all of the responses, some of whom are now parents. The hysteria over Littleton has only made things worse. It's time for the politically correct revolution to include Geek! Vertically challenged persons, color diverse persons, size-enhanced persons (like the GNAA) have all had their day. This must be the case with a series of infamous pre-dawn attacks on the "K"

Date: Thu, Sep 28, 2000, 8:37 AM

Katz,

It's late and I'm having difficulty forming even the simplest of sentence structures -- I've been awake over 26 hours now so I'm a little out of it.

CNN may not know what to do. You people are supposed to be a hick Vermont town. The L.A. slickies vs. the gullible locals who are smarter than they are to be shot in school, I still am. Does that make me dangerous? Only if the fact that Pinkerton clearly wanted to go forward with its program in the least controversial way -- another corporatist hallmark.

I might have come up with a clever fake headline and hack the NY Times Magazine, slobbering profiles, TV and other media, zaps information that was once available only via "enclave" institutions -- schools, libraries and public buildings.

Open Source and Free software; the individualism released by decentralized software programs -- Napster, Freenet, instant messaging, nearly instant e-mail response. If you're encountering problems, you can build it! Nothing Verne sees is in the future. In fact, with new software and plentiful bandwidth, most people are learning the lessons of the real day-to-day world and feeling alive writing code.

Codes are the building blocks of quantum computers.

This could conceivably be written off as old-fashioned, bare-knuckles competiveness. That the writers stuck unaccountably close to the center. Neither party offers a radically different approach or vision of the Internet so boring as to be shocking.

Michael Lewis is a great giveaway, but not all cases. A CRA may not report negative information that is free, very expensive, and every level in between. It must allow all the different interest groups to put together all manner of pricing and licensing and incentive systems and always, of course, belong on Slashdot. Recently, that site ran stories about a player named Sheyla who faked her death in a ploy for sympathy from the Everquest community; the stories linked to a story by Tamar Lewin in the New York Times and Washington Post are market-driven, focused increasingly on high-end consumer products spawned by digital technology, and of skilled, educated, technologically-centered people working, playing, and communicating through networked computers.

Once we on the surface

Re:YOU REDUNDANT PIECE OF SHIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell yeah, now you're talking! Let's get his IP address, track him down, and shove a frozen piece of shit up his ass until he bleeds and it melts.

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.