[tlug] DDB/CJKV-E Web Host under DDOS attack

[Charles Muller <acmuller@example.com>]

Dear Colleagues,

For more than a week, our web hosting service, Linode, has seen its 
servers worldwide fall under a sustained dDos attack that has continued 
to cripple its business (see note from Linode below). As a result, the 
DDB and CJKVE dictionaries have also been shut down periodically. We are 
presently working on alternative solutions as we follow the situation. 
If you happen to experience difficulties in accessing the dictionaries 
in the coming days, please understand that we are aware of the 
situation, and will do our best to maintain our service.

Regards,

Chuck

===============================================
An update from Linode about the recent DDoS attacks

I’d like to share some updates about the recent DDoS attacks.

I am one of several network engineers at Linode. All of us have been 
working around the clock on DDoS mitigation. While things are stable, I 
would like to take a moment to publicly address the large and frequent 
DDoS attacks that we have been receiving since Christmas Day.

It has become evident in the past two days that a bad actor is 
purchasing large amounts of botnet capacity in an attempt to 
significantly damage Linode’s business. The following is a partial list 
of attacks we have received in no particular order:

- Multiple volumetric attacks simultaneously directed toward all of our 
authoritative nameservers, causing DNS hosting outages
- Multiple volumetric attacks simultaneously directed toward all of our 
public-facing websites, causing Linode Manager outages
- Layer 7 (“400 bad request”) attacks toward our web and application 
servers, causing Linode Manager outages
- Large volumetric attacks toward our colocation provider’s upstream 
interconnection points, overwhelming the router control planes and 
causing significant congestion/packet loss
- Large volumetric attacks toward Linode network infrastructure, 
overwhelming the router control planes and causing significant 
congestion/packet loss

All of these attacks have occurred multiple times. Over the course of 
the last week, we have seen over 30 attacks of significant duration and 
impact. As we have found ways to mitigate these attacks, the vectors 
used inevitably change.

As of this afternoon, we have mostly hardened ourselves against the 
above attack vectors, but we expect more to come. We are working 
extremely closely with all of our technical partners, including our 
network equipment vendors and our colocation providers, to prevent 
future attacks.

Once these attacks stop, we plan to share a complete technical 
explanation about what has been happening. Additionally, we will be 
announcing the details of an ongoing project to significantly improve 
our internet connectivity and resiliency.

We would like to apologize for the lack of detail in some of our recent 
status-page updates. Please know that we are dedicating all resources 
from multiple departments to stopping these attacks. We acknowledge the 
amount of downtime we’ve been experiencing is completely unacceptable, 
and we appreciate the understanding and support we have received over 
the past several days. We will share more information as our 
investigation continues.

Alex Forster
Network Engineer at Linode
Posted on Dec 31, 22:23 UTC



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A. Charles Muller

Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology
Faculty of Letters
University of Tokyo
7-3-1 Hongō, Bunkyō-ku
Tokyo 113-8654, Japan

Office Phone: 03-5841-3735

Web Site: Resources for East Asian Language and Thought
http://www.acmuller.net

Twitter: @H_Buddhism