Ask Slashdot: Experience Handling DDoS Attacks On a Mid-Tier Site?

New submitter caboosesw writes "A customer of mine recently was hit by a quick and massive DDoS attack. As we were in the middle of things, we learned that there are proxy services of varying maturity to deal with these kinds of outbreaks from the small and mysterious (DOSArrest, ServerOrigin, BlackLotus, DDOSProtection, CloudFlare, etc.) to the large and mature (Prolexic, Verisign, etc.) Have you guys used any of these services? Especially on the lower price point that a small e-commerce (not pr0n or gambling) company could afford? Is a DDoS service really mandatory as Gartner now puts this type of service in the same tier as SEIM, firewalls, IPS, etc?"

Comments

Best defense: Overprovisioning and cutoffs

[LostCluster]

There's two key strategies to avoid being DDoSed... first, have more processor, network speed, and disk I/O resources than you need for normal load so that the attacker can't fill one of your computers pipes. Then, host your server or servers at multi-connected datacenters which can cut off large users of your server before it reaches your NIC card. Firewalls at the server can't get back the bandwidth lost to needless connections, but firewalls at the datacenter entry points can. Basically, make sure none of your time-sensitive loads reach 100% and you're fine.

Load balancing and an experienced sysadmin

[FireballX301]

The load balancer to take the brunt of the attack and distribute traffic to multiple mirrors, and the sysadmin to watch the attack and start blacklisting IP ranges. Your service provider should have some kind of service in place unless you got the cheapest of cheap hosting solutions.

With that being said, hiring a third party ddos mitigator is entirely a cost benefit analysis that should be done on your end. Can whoever's providing your hosting now provision some extra servers and some harried sysadmins to keep you floating? See if you can ask for additional service support from your current provider.

Re:Load balancing and an experienced sysadmin

[Snowhare]

Having been the target of an HTTP-DDOS attack, I can tell you that manually blacklisting IP ranges is really ineffective. A DDOS botnet is comprised of thousands of machines that have been randomly infected by whatever vector the botnet operator used: Emails, web drive-by, etc. The result is that the source addresses are scattered widely with little relation between most participating addresses.

To defend against the attack, I wrote up an automatic firewall blacklisting program that detected and blocked each participating IP address individually in near-realtime. I was blocking more than 31,000 separate addresses before the DDOSers finally gave up trying to down the attacked website. Wierdly, there appears to have been no motive at all for the attack, yet they spent weeks attacking the target machine and actively trying to tune their attack to get past my filtering.

Re:Change Apache to nginx

[dreamchaser]

If it helps against DDOS attacks, how is it stupid advice?

Because it doesn't really and you're just being a fanboi?

What Are The Odds

[sycodon]

That all these "services" are part of a protection racket?

"Oh...having DDOS problems? Just sign up with our service and we can help you out."

  While not as crude as burning down building, DDOS attacks are a perfect persuader to grow your business.

I figure this is half tin foil hat and half probably real, given the things organized crime has been into in the past. It's perfect actually, you don't have to hurt people, the attacks can't be traced and your "protection" can be fine tuned to avoid looking suspicious.

Don't ask on /.

[Nethead]

This is a discussion you need to take to the NANOG list. Don't ask the amateurs, ask the professionals. The answer will involve ACLs, BGP settings, and community strings. If you don't have your own ASN then you need to push the issue upstream and work with your provider. Period. If you do have your own ASN and are running BGP then you need to read the NANOG list (and learn to take shit from Randy Bush, et al. They know what they are talking about.) Asking on /. can only make things worse.