Trying to tweet today? You’re going to have to keep those 140 character thoughts to yourself for the moment. Twitter is down due to a major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the DNS provider that Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Shopify and more rely on. The attack has broken the link between the URLs web users type into their browsers and the corresponding IP addresses. This results in outages and loading issues that plague large sections of the internet – primarily in the US for this particular attack.
This attack comes not long after a DDoS attack on independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs’ website, which is recorded as one of the largest DDoS attacks in history. If the likes of a leading cybersecurity professional and a DNS provider hosting some of the most highly trafficked websites in the world can be hacked, is anybody safe?
It is important to have the right denial of service protection in place whether you’re a start-up with 10 team members or a social media behemoth that employs 4,000. Fortunately for NYI customers its Fault Tolerant Web (FTW) services offer various levels of protection to mitigate the effects of DDoS attacks.
First and foremost is the combination of distributed load balancing and caching. The large amount of traffic handled by the edge is split amongst a number of data centers, which diminishes the amount of traffic arriving at a single location. When you combine this with the integrated caching layer at each edge node the majority of unwanted traffic is absorbed at the edges. This further reduces DoS overhead and ultimately blocks this unwanted traffic from your server.
At its core NYI’s FTW features specific Denial of Service attack protection that utilizes layer-3 and layer-7 information to identify and block abusive traffic. The amount of traffic coming into the edge is monitored by per-IP traffic limits and the amount of connections to origin servers help keep your server from being overloaded. FTW will disengage from your server to allow it time to recover in the unlikely event that your server is overloaded or unavailable. In this case, it would serve previously cached content in Fault-Tolerant mode indefinitely.
Are you covered against DDoS security threats? Contact us today to protect yourself with NYI’s FTW before it’s too late.
