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Wikileaks moves to Amazon's cloud to evade massive DDoS

arstechnica.com

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Re: Wikileaks moves to Amazon's cloud to evade massive DDoS

#4

Post by brianr »

This is very interesting. If Wikileaks does in fact become designated a terrorist organization by the US, then it seems Amazon will have to shut them down or run the risk of providing them "material aid".

The same would be true of any other cloud provider... are there any sizable cloud providers outside the US?

Re: Wikileaks moves to Amazon's cloud to evade massive DDoS

#6

Post by risotto »

mh_ wrote: post #2

Moving to an elastic infrastructure in the face of an attack that aims to increase usage, seems like a recipe for a huge bill.. The wikileaks guys are obviously uber smart and have thought through the pros and cons of the move, but it seems an unusual choice..

As it's mostly static content, they're likely just using Amazon as a CDN, which isn't very expensive at all.

Makes perfect sense actually. It'll be interesting to see what Amazon has to say about this.

Re: Wikileaks moves to Amazon's cloud to evade massive DDoS

#7

Post by d2viant »

bradly wrote: post #3

I'm not familiar with Amazon's content policies, but I couldn't see Amazon wanting this stuff hosted on their servers.

It would depend on how Wikileaks designed their AWS infrastructure. Amazon's policies are specific to the territory in which they operate. They obey the local laws for the data they will store on their hardware and will only comply with local laws. For example, if you provision your services in the EU-Ireland region, it is governed by the laws of the EU, not by the United States. That being said, I don't know the specifics of the laws with regards to each of the different AWS regions.

Re: Wikileaks moves to Amazon's cloud to evade massive DDoS

#8

Post by ra »

mh_ wrote: post #2

Moving to an elastic infrastructure in the face of an attack that aims to increase usage, seems like a recipe for a huge bill.. The wikileaks guys are obviously uber smart and have thought through the pros and cons of the move, but it seems an unusual choice..

Using CloudFront (Amazon's CDN) does promise to solve their immediate DDoS problem.

I don't know much about wikileaks as an organisation but I expect most of their money comes as donations via the web site.

So, clearly having wikileaks.org up at high traffic times is important.

Re: Wikileaks moves to Amazon's cloud to evade massive DDoS

#9

Post by ScottBurson »

brianr wrote: post #4

This is very interesting. If Wikileaks does in fact become designated a terrorist organization by the US, then it seems Amazon will have to shut them down or run the risk of providing them "material aid". The same would be true of any other cloud provider... are there any sizable cloud providers outside the US?

The overheated rhetoric spewing from some politicians notwithstanding, I can hope that no court of law will be persuaded that there can be a terrorist organization without weapons, indeed without violence of any kind.

(Even if Assange has committed some violent crime on his own -- and I am not saying he has -- this is clearly not the purpose of the organization.)

Re: Wikileaks moves to Amazon's cloud to evade massive DDoS

#10

Post by netmau5 »

I know DDOS is a difficult problem to solve, but I think using the cloud to out-scale your attacker doesn't solve the problem, it just increases the cost of it. The obvious solution for the bad guys (not gonna call them hackers, can't call them crackers can I?) is to use the cloud too. Generating an HTTP request is even cheaper than serving static content on a CDN.
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