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How LulzSec kept itself safe during the summer of 'lulz'

newscientist.com

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Re: How LulzSec kept itself safe during the summer of 'lulz'

#12

Post by jgrahamc »

Tossrock wrote: post #6

My bullshit detector went off somewhere around here: "CloudFlare provides performance and security for any website online.We handle more traffic through our network now than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga and Aol combined." Considering Wiki, Twitter and Amazon are all top 10 global sites, I'm having a hard time imagining someone doing more traffic than all of them put together, even disregarding the rounding error…

Here's our internal data on this. Based on page view data (values below are page views) and using the statistics from Google DoubleClick Ad Planner (http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/) we have the following for the last 30 days:

    Wikipedia.org    6,000,000,000
    Twitter.com      5,900,000,000
    Amazon.com       4,900,000,000
    Aol.com          5,400,000,000
    Zynga.com          460,000,000
    Total           22,660,000,000
Then looking at our own internal network for the last 30 days we see:

    CloudFlare      27,066,719,054							
So we did about 4.4B more page views than the combined sites above which would actually leave us room to add LinkedIn and Flickr to the list.

Re: How LulzSec kept itself safe during the summer of 'lulz'

#13

Post by marshray »

victork2 wrote: post #7

Nice ad Cloudfare... Wait, was it a legit article ? NewScientist took a hit in my heart in terms of credibility with this article.

Yes, it was a vendor interview piece with a linkbait-and-switch title. (Cloudfare didn't keep Lulzsec "safe", they kept their website up.)

But NewScientist's primary audience is not web hosting specialists. So for their audience I expect it was mildly educational.

Re: How LulzSec kept itself safe during the summer of 'lulz'

#15

Post by bcl »

patrickxb wrote: post #5

does anyone have experience with cloudflare? good service?

I tried them out for a bit, mostly because of their always-on claim but it didn't work for my sites for some reason so I switched to Amazon.

Their interface is nice, but I don't like the fact that you have to switch your DNS over to them and then re-enter data like MX records. With amazon I just point the parts of my domains I want to use to them and the rest remains with my primary DNS hosting.

Re: How LulzSec kept itself safe during the summer of 'lulz'

#16

Post by blibble »

bcl wrote: post #15
patrickxb wrote: post #5

does anyone have experience with cloudflare? good service?

I tried them out for a bit, mostly because of their always-on claim but it didn't work for my sites for some reason so I switched to Amazon. Their interface is nice, but I don't like the fact that you have to switch your DNS over to them and then re-enter data like MX records. With amazon I just point the parts of my domains I want to use to them and the rest remains with my primary DNS hosting.

if you email them you can get onto the private CNAME beta!

Re: How LulzSec kept itself safe during the summer of 'lulz'

#17

Post by DanBlake »

My understanding of cloud flare is that they null route you if any major attack comes in- Seems a little bit unfair they didnt do this for lulzsec just to get the press. If you are some boring website that gets the same attack lulzsec does, they will just disconnect/nullroute you.

Correct me if any of this inaccurate, but last I checked it was not.

Re: How LulzSec kept itself safe during the summer of 'lulz'

#18

Post by rictic »

jgrahamc wrote: post #12
Tossrock wrote: post #6

My bullshit detector went off somewhere around here: "CloudFlare provides performance and security for any website online.We handle more traffic through our network now than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga and Aol combined." Considering Wiki, Twitter and Amazon are all top 10 global sites, I'm having a hard time imagining someone doing more traffic than all of them put together, even disregarding the rounding error…

Here's our internal data on this. Based on page view data (values below are page views) and using the statistics from Google DoubleClick Ad Planner ( http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/ ) we have the following for the last 30 days: Wikipedia.org 6,000,000,000 Twitter.com 5,900,000,000 Amazon.com 4,900,000,000 Aol.com 5,400,000,000 Zynga.com 460,000,000 Total 22,660,000,000 Then looking at our own internal…

Are you confident that you're comparing apples to apples there, and not e.g. pageviews to http requests?

Re: How LulzSec kept itself safe during the summer of 'lulz'

#19

Post by nicksuan »

Tossrock wrote: post #6

My bullshit detector went off somewhere around here: "CloudFlare provides performance and security for any website online.We handle more traffic through our network now than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga and Aol combined." Considering Wiki, Twitter and Amazon are all top 10 global sites, I'm having a hard time imagining someone doing more traffic than all of them put together, even disregarding the rounding error…

It doesn't seem that surprising. Just digging around in the passive DNS database at work, I see CloudFlare has their name servers in the NS records of several 10's of thousands of domains. I'm fairly sure that given the scope of the sources of this data, that list is nowhere near complete.

Re: How LulzSec kept itself safe during the summer of 'lulz'

#20

Post by andrewthornton »

DanBlake wrote: post #17

My understanding of cloud flare is that they null route you if any major attack comes in- Seems a little bit unfair they didnt do this for lulzsec just to get the press. If you are some boring website that gets the same attack lulzsec does, they will just disconnect/nullroute you. Correct me if any of this inaccurate, but last I checked it was not.

This is very true as I saw it first hand around the very same time.
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