DDoS Attacked HotSchedules -Down For 45 Hrs

http://www.darkreading.com/cloud/inside-a-vicious-ddos-attack/a/d-id/1321286 has the full story – it is worth your time for you to read it.

 

The technical overview by the CEO is the following (from article):

{ The assailants hit with 10- to 15 gigabytes per second (Gbps) of traffic – 250 times our standard rate. When I called my peers in banking and telecom for advice, they were stunned. This was more than enough traffic to bring down most commercial businesses. It required a whole team of assailants, careful orchestration, and an expensive investment in network resources. }

DDOS means Distributed Denial of Service.  So on a pure technical point if 10-15 Gbps traffic comes at your computers, most computers would not be able to do what they normally do. And the effect is what happened, in essence the attack succeeded in causing HotSchedules to stop operating for a time.

It was only through extraordinary effort the staff basically rebuilt the service on a different server system to get out of this danger.  this is highly unusual, The Security engineers were not ready for this type of attack. It is an unusual attack, but the security people failed.

This is also an interesting statement by Anthony (President and CEO)

{ Considering that 90 percent of companies suffer DDoS attacks, protection is worth it, no matter how much it may cost. }

Digest that for a minute…  especially if you have cloud services.  HotSchedules is a cloud service.

The attack did not make sense, did not get sourced, (due to its distributed nature)