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Comment by voidz | Hacker News Reader

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voidz

They gave Krebs the service free of charge.

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I mentioned that above, but I think this misses my point, which is:

If Akamai can't provide their service for free, then they shouldn't provide their service for free.

A CDN's whole business is resilience, which in this case makes them the bodyguard, not a bystander.

Whatever your opinion of Cloudflare, it seems clear to me that Matthew Prince keenly understands this, hence him reaching out and offering to step in and get Krebs back online.

tldr; If Akamai can't do the one job they exist to do in the face of an (albeit well armed) assailant, then they're the problem, not Krebs.

"This was flagged to my attention and I've reviewed all the interactions between the author and our team [cloudflare]. The site in question was using the free version of CloudFlare's service. On February 2, 2013, the site came under a substantial Layer 7 DDoS attack. While we provide basic DDoS mitigation for all customers (even those on the Free CloudFlare plan), for the mitigation of large attacks a site needs at least the Business tier of CloudFlare's service. In an effort to keep the site online, our ops team enabled I'm Under Attack Mode, which is available for Free customers and enhances DDoS protection.

The attack continued and began to affect the performance of other CloudFlare customers, at which point we routed traffic to the site away from our network."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5214480

That was 3.5 years ago. CloudFlare's ability to deal with DDoS has changed substantially in that time and we deal with enormous attacks day in day out automatically.

So how would you feel about 600gbit+? I'm genuinely curious, would it be an interesting challenge or an immediate avoidance? As a business customer myself and a big fan of CF's general attitude to these sorts of things, I know be very happy to see the blog post on it.

We've offered to help Brian Krebs out. We don't see any reason we could not handle an attack of that size. We've already seen gigantic attacks and have a very well developed automatic infrastructure for dealing all manner of attacks at different layers and an experienced 24/7 network team.

How do you feel about Kreb's criticism of CloudFlare for, in his view, sheltering the web presences of various DDoS-for-hire services? Just wondering what your response to his articles such as "Spreading the Disease and Selling the Cure" is. He seems to have taken some pretty strong anti-CloudFlare public positions.

https://youtu.be/wW5vJyI_HcU?t=45m19s

I just want to take this opportunity to say that as a paying customer, this attitude towards your duty of keeping a site online, no matter who's it is, is exactly why we swear by CloudFlare and why almost no one else seems appealing in this field. I've watched your competition snuff out customers for being too controversial, while you guys just get it done. Thanks for this, it's really changed the shape of the internet in some ways.

Honestly I didn't know about this instance, but as another poster has mentioned, I don't believe this reflects where Cloudflare is today, and that's who Akamai is competing with.

On a side note, they really don't appear to be making a concerted effort to get out in front of this which tells me that they either aren't aware of the reaction or don't think it's a big deal.

Either way, it just makes them look bad.

They gave him service for free and covered many, many smaller attacks, including the 20-100Gbps attacks he reported earlier this month. The fact that they decided not to cover one of the largest attacks ever documented pro bono isn't great but I don't think any of their clients would fail to understand the difference between a favor and a signed contract.

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