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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

For a large DDOS attack there aren't any easy ways to only drop the DDOS traffic - especially if it's hard to identify the DDOS traffic in the first place. If they're getting more 'bad' incoming traffic than their connections can handle I don't know how they'd drop that stuff - they have to receive the packets before they can filter them. Maybe their bandwidth provider has tricks for this...

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They're using Prolexic by the looks of things.. You'd think a company that specializes in mitigating DDoS attacks would be able to mitigate DDoS attacks. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the word mitigate

Security companies are all snakeoil.

They never deliver from experience. They always bill though.

Infosec in general is a ghetto of navel-gazers.

In response to your comment and the parent comment, from someone in InfoSec: security can never be completed in the way a product can be. It's an ongoing war, and sometimes your opponent gets the upper hand for a while. The problem with being the "good guys" in security is that you have to make sure every hole is closed while still letting the business run. It's easier to be the bad guy, because you just have to find one thing the security team missed.

Security doesn't exist without the business and the business doesn't exist without security, but the business tends to trump security for the sake of features and convenience. It's a very delicate see-saw, and all you can really do is trying to run back and forth from side to side hoping that the other end doesn't hit the ground before you can get over there again.

Attitudes like yours don't help a damn thing.

Actually as a solution architect I have to deal with all sides of the problems: people attacking, audit companies, penetration testing companies and software engineers leaving gaping holes.

The only people who deliver little value are the paid up consultants. When a full penetration and code review misses 4 purposely placed obvious vulnerabilities (by myself) they get told to fuck off. Application firewalls which are circumvented trivially. QoS solutions that don't work.

So far, four well known, well respected companies offering certification and testing have missed the holes and have been fired.

That's the problem: no delivery.

My attitude might be wrong in your eyes but I refuse to employ box tickers which is what the entire white hat side of the industry is about. Canned report, where's my cheque?

No seesaw other than a bent twisted one that sucks up cash in exchange for a half arsed job.

It's not their fault, we were in the middle of provisioning and service validation with them but it wasn't completed. We're had to work through some issues on the fly that we were trying to do non-disruptively, but they're mitigating well for us now that we've got it dialed in.

Fair enough. In that case at least it's not a Friday

Every defense system has its limitations. There's a truism that if brute force doesn't work, you aren't using enough of it and I think that applies to running a DDOS attack.

Couldn't they use something like cloudflare to have the IP point to local servers? Then the traffic is split on location, with each edge server taking only local requests. That should greatly reduce the incoming traffic, at which point they can try to filter out the 'bad'.

You assume that the attack was limited to their web stack. For all we know it could be the systems that handle the git-over-ssh connections.

I may not be too versed in CloudFlare, but I didn't think they would be able to protect a service like SSH.

Getting things through https definitely did not work for some time. I thought I broke my vundle.

Indeed you would not be able to. CloudFlare only does HTTP/HTTPS right now. Technically since Nginx can also support SMTP they should be able to do that as well but it's not implemented currently. Basically if you want to protect SSH it would have to be a provider that does layer-level protection like Prolexic.

Well, cloud flare can certainly forward (or not forward, in the case of bad) ssh traffic. But they would need to dedicate an IP to your account, or provide you with a port number to use.

Is it feasable to firewall whitelist any IP that has ever pushed to a repo?

You could, but now you're just forcing the attackers to fork an existing project and push some nonsense code to it before they can attack.

Why would you want to cut off all people that use only the web front-end?

There are certainly providers that have networks you can hide behind which can filter+absorb DDoS traffic for you.

That doesn't work in all cases. If you can't distinguish between good and bad traffic or if it isn't specifically targeting an entity it becomes much more difficult to handle.

It also depends on the ingenuity of the DDoS attack, none of which are known to the public so you can't really say anything sensible about it.

If the anti-DDoS mitigating tools they are using aren't working nor is using other services like Prolexic that's usually hint enough that this isn't particularly common or easily filtered out.

You can gripe on all the companies and tools if you will but a good DDoS is quite a bit more complex than 'just filter away the bad crap'.

> you can't really say anything sensible about it

See #4 of the 12 timeless networking truths:

   (4)  Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor
        understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in
        networking can never be fully understood by someone who neither
        builds commercial networking equipment nor runs an operational
        network.

-- http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/10/2/rfc-1925-the-twelv...

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