Over the past 24 hours the Nexus sites have gone down 3 times, sometimes for as much as an hour. It's school holiday season which means it's also DDoS season, typically a time when an abnormally high amount of DDoS attacks happen (logical conclusion is...?). We're told by our hosts that we are not the target but unfortunately we're being taken down due to the attacks happening against our host's and main data centre's infrastructure. It's nice to know we're not the target, at least, but obviously it still sucks.
If you're wondering why we don't just "do something" about it. We do. We pay a lot of money (right now about $3200 a month and growing) to help against DDoS attacks, but DDoS mitigation is a bit like
that scene at the end of Batman Begins where Jim Gordon is talking to batman and he's talking about escalation. "We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing kevlar, they buy armour piercing rounds. And you're wearing a mask...". You can buy a ridiculously expensive firewall that can scrub 20GB/s of malicious traffic on your upstream, then you'll just get attacked by a bigger botnet that attacks you with 50GB/s of malicious traffic. You buy a firewall that can handle 75GB/s, they attack you with 100GB/s. And so on and so forth. And each time it gets more and more expensive to combat against. And it can get
really, really expensive after a certain point.
We and our hosts continue to react to the DDoS attacks as and when they happen. If they happen while I'm at my computer then I'm updating the
Nexus Twitter account to let people know about the down-time and that we're aware of it. So if you like to be kept in the loop while the sites are down then you can follow us on Twitter. We don't really use that account for anything else right now so you won't get spammed about crap you don't care about!
While the techheads work to sort this out for all of us (and this DDoS is affecting thousands of sites, so we're not the only victims) please sit tight and be patient. At the end of the day, this is one person ruining it or all of us. Well, one person, and hundreds of thousands of computer illiterate people who haven't secured their PC's/routers/Internet of Things hardware against people using their hardware as botnets. So by all means, take this time to review your own system security!
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