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from the stop-looking-at-the-wrong-thing dept.
From the following story:
Amazon has still not provided any useful information or insights into the DDoS attack that took down swathes of websites last week, so let's turn to others that were watching.
One such company is digital monitoring firm Catchpoint, which sent us its analysis of the attack in which it makes two broad conclusions: that Amazon was slow in reacting to the attack, and that tardiness was likely the result of its looking in the wrong places.
Even though cloud providers go to some lengths to protect themselves, the DDoS attack shows that even a company as big as Amazon is vulnerable. Not only that but, thanks to the way that companies use cloud services these days, the attack has a knock-on impact.
"A key takeaway is the ripple effect impact when an outage happens to a third-party cloud service like S3," Catchpoint noted.
The attack targeted Amazon's S3 - Simple Storage Service - which provides object storage through a web interface. It did not directly target the larger Amazon Web Services (AWS) but for many companies the end result was the same: their websites fell over.
[...] Amazon responded by rerouting packets through a DDoS mitigation service run by Neustar but it took hours for the company to respond. Catchpoint says its first indications that something was up came five hours before Amazon seemingly noticed, saying it saw "anomalies" that it says should have served as early warnings signs.
When it had resolved the issue, Amazon said the attack happened "between 1030 and 1830 PST," but Catchpoint's system shows highly unusual activity from 0530. We should point out that Catchpoint sells monitoring services for a living so it has plenty of reasons to highlight its system's efficacy, but that said, assuming the graphic we were given [PDF] is accurate - and we have double-checked with Catchpoint - it does appear that Amazon was slow to recognize the threat.
Catchpoint says the problem is that Amazon - and many other organizations - are using an "old" way of measuring what's going on. They monitor their own systems rather than the impact on users.
"It is critical to primarily focus on the end-user," Catchpoint argues. "In this case, if you were just monitoring S3, you would have missed the problem (perhaps, being alerted first by frustrated users)."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday October 30 2019, @07:04PM
When the cloud breaks, the report on the failure is equally cloudy.
Can I claim this as a law of technology?
I personally would be more comfortable calling the cloud the 'crystal palace of self-serving fantasy' or 'moongel catacomb of over-simplified wishes'
You can to trust these systems to the extent that you say nothing their owners want you to say, and to the extent this powers most of the internet, your chances for censorship on your vacation just rose significantly.
And of course, to the extent they did not change what you are allowed to say in the last 5 minutes. Or no one in their vast corporate hierarchy leaked your credentials to someone who wants to.
Or, also, when Jeff Bezos pisses off anyone. Hard to imagine eh? Heck, his wife could buy her own cloud at this point and simply ddos him at critical moments. She might even be able to afford some zero day cpu flaws with that kind of cash.
We might be better off with Zeus just being able to strike us with lightning rather than this intenational rich douchebag duel we are all tied to the mast of presently.
But what do I know. Oh, yeah,
thesesystemsarefailing.net