Live data from Hacker News

DNSimple DDOS Attack

dnsimplestatus.com

41–50 of 120 posts

Re: DNSimple DDOS Attack

#41
Unfortunately, it's not the first time it happens, my app is down and customers unhappy.

I always wonder, why is it that someone wants to attack a small company like DNSimple ? Is it that they were blackmailed and did not surrender to the criminals? If so, why would anyone be interested in blackmailing such a small company?

Re: DNSimple DDOS Attack

#42
post #16
post #2

We're kinda tied into DNSimple since we use an ALIAS record for our bare/naked/root domain. Amazon's Route53 supports aliases, but via a 301 redirect, which doesn't work in an SSL context (without browser warnings). Nonetheless, we just spun up a Route53 zone, exported our zone from DNSimple, imported to Route53, and hand-migrated our ALIAS records to static A records in the new zone. Not perfect or permanent, but we…

A few people do ALIAS style records, DNSMadeEasy and EasyDNS do "ANAME" records which are pretty much the same.

Will these services not have the same thin pipe issue that's currently affecting DNSimple?

Re: DNSimple DDOS Attack

#43
For those wondering about alternatives to ALIAS: if you use a www subdomain, then you can simply use CNAMEs. (Though the appearance is a matter of taste...)

Google, Facebook, etc, all use this approach.

Re: DNSimple DDOS Attack

#44
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dns is less easily distributed when fancy features like ALIAS (which dnsimple is widely known for) are in the mix. and wide distribution isn't enough to win vs truly volumetric attacks. it takes a lot of ports and compute to absorb 100Gbps+ attacks which are not uncommon against major providers.

DNSimple is widely know for the ALIAS pseudo-"record" because they invented it[1]. Small wonder that a proprietary syntactical sugar leaves you at the mercy of select vendors? As for volumetric attacks: your point is correct, but is irrelevant if you're using multiple vendors, and a specific, single vendor is the target, like it appears here. Your other authoritative servers would be unaffected. 1 http://support.dnsi…

good luck finding any major online property or infrastructure that isn't making use of some kind of proprietary syntactical dns sugar. it doesn't mean you can't span providers, but it does mean it takes a lot more work to do so.

anyway, you're not wrong, the best approach to mitigate this kind of thing is to leverage multiple dns networks. but doing so is not easy unless the application is still using dns like it was in 1995, and that is increasingly rarely the case.

Re: DNSimple DDOS Attack

#45

DNS is so straightforward, so easily distributed, and so fundamental, that I'm always astounded when it's a single point of failure for so many operations. I wonder how many of the affected companies do have redundant appservers and load balancers, but missed this piece of the puzzle...

I'm surprised more places don't run their own DNS. It's not that difficult to do and it means you don't have to rely on another third party for service.

Re: DNSimple DDOS Attack

#46
post #13
post #11

What are the recommended practices to prevent too much down time when your DNS provider goes down?

My site is currently offline from this attack. I am considering that providers like DNSimple simply cannot provide the networking availability to mitigate these kinds of attacks. This is because the solution to these kinds of attacks, often, is that you need a larger pipe than the attackers. Very few people are good at both and having a huge pipe. For web apps, you can use CloudFlare, which does have a bigger pipe an…

Yes, CloudFlare has a full-featured DNS offering, even if you don't use their proxying services.

Re: DNSimple DDOS Attack

#47
post #19

Anyone switching from DNSimple? I really don't want to, but we've been down for almost 3 hours. I've seen chatter about Cloudfare and it looks pretty good, reviews?

Recent outages were reported earlier in the week.

(ObRandom: I run a service that wraps route53 with git integration, at https://dns-api.com/ )

Re: DNSimple DDOS Attack

#48
post #41

Unfortunately, it's not the first time it happens, my app is down and customers unhappy. I always wonder, why is it that someone wants to attack a small company like DNSimple ? Is it that they were blackmailed and did not surrender to the criminals? If so, why would anyone be interested in blackmailing such a small company?

More likely, I'd guess based on past experience, it's that someone wanted to take down one of their customers, and decided (or found) that the weakest link was the DNS provider.

Re: DNSimple DDOS Attack

#49
post #41

Unfortunately, it's not the first time it happens, my app is down and customers unhappy. I always wonder, why is it that someone wants to attack a small company like DNSimple ? Is it that they were blackmailed and did not surrender to the criminals? If so, why would anyone be interested in blackmailing such a small company?

My guess is one of their customers was being attacked–and this was the easiest route to get to them.

Re: DNSimple DDOS Attack

#50
post #26
post #19

Anyone switching from DNSimple? I really don't want to, but we've been down for almost 3 hours. I've seen chatter about Cloudfare and it looks pretty good, reviews?

We switched periscope.io from DNSimple to Amazon Route 53. DNSimple doesn't have an exporter so it took about an hour, including having one engineer review the other engineer's work. Many customers were able to resolve the domain in the minutes immediately following the switch, and the rest seem to be trickling in.

Amazon's route53 is an awesome service :)
Post reply on HN