Official News page 1

SERVICE DENIED!

by Hazed

On Thursday evening, our hosting company and ISP, Melbourne, were hit by a denial of service attack. This meant they lost connectivity for a short period, and that in turn caused Fed DataSpace to be cut off from the real world. You may have found you could not log on to the game or to our website while this was happening.

While this was going on, the game continued to run so nobody lost anything - it's just that you couldn't get to it!

A denial of service attack is a deliberate attempt to cut off a computer resource so it stops being available to its users. The most common method is to flood the network with communication requests so that it becomes saturated and cannot respond to legitimate traffic.

Here's the official report from Melbourne that explains exactly what happened:

OUTAGE REPORT - 19/08/2010 21:49 - 23:01

At the above time, customers will have experienced a service outage which would have affected external transit and internet connectivity. Internal connectivity on our network was not affected and continued to operate.

The root cause of this was a UDP DDoS attack from an illegal IRC botnet against one of our customer's IP space, who was situated on the same shared firewall device that your server(s) are sat behind.

Due to the nature of attack, the shared firewall device was unable to cope with the amount of UDP packets and was unable to apply firewall rules in a timely manner (causing packet loss). Because of this, the firewall automatically failed over to the secondary device in the pair, which was also unable to cope causing a full outage.

As this botnet operated on a number of compromised machines around the world, it made it extremely difficult to isolate and contain the attack.

At 23:01 we were able to completely filter the attack upstream, resolving the issue.

We are currently looking at putting additional monitoring in-place to identify and filter similar issues quicker in future. However, please bear in mind that the network is regularly victim to attacks such as these, without them affecting our customers.

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