Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

One of the calls I saw for the current round of DDoS attacks listed Amazon as one of the targets. It seems to be having no effect. Can I infer from this that Amazon knows how to handle DDoS attacks?

If so, would one reasonable answer to the question then be "host with Amazon" and let them deal with it for you? Or at least have a backup ready at Amazon to switch to? (With the recent announcement that Amazon's hosting is now PCI level 1 compliant, hosting at Amazon becomes possible for many for whom it was not an option).

View on HN

>One of the calls I saw for the current round of DDoS attacks listed Amazon as one of the targets. It seems to be having no effect. Can I infer from this that Amazon knows how to handle DDoS attacks?

keep in mind that you are paying for that DDoS traffic. $0.08 per gigabyte means you are paying something north of $350/hr for a 10Gps DDoS.

Now, I guess if you only expect the traffic to continue for a short while that's not a bad deal at all, but if it goes on for any period of time, that can get expensive fast.

For comparison, one of my providers has offered me a 10 gigabit transit link for around $10.5K/month, so assuming I could use that to DDoS you, (and really, that sort of thing would be... difficult. Far easier to hire out a botnet.) I'd be spending about a dollar to cost you twenty dollars.

Amazon operates on a scale where they can handle this type of thing I don't mean automaticlaly, but they have the access points and gear in place to do it, and the levearage with the right ISPs.

Buying a 10 gig link woulnd't be a distributed denial of service attack, and itwould be far too easy for the providers to not only find out who it was and filter it out, but to find out who to sue for all the wasted time and bandwidth and other criminal charges.

First, you are assuming both parties are in the same country, and second, you think the provider would notice instantly, or charge ~$6 per minute until filtered.

and lsc is assuming in his calculations that he'd be able to attack for a month.

>Amazon operates on a scale where they can handle this type of thing

My point is that by "handle this sort of thing" in the context of ec2, means "charge you for the traffic and pass it through" which some times is just fine; but quite often it still means a denial of service, if it doesn't bring down your servers, it will eventually bring down your bank account. I mean, I don't know about you, but at north of $350 an hour, my bank account isn't going to last long.

This works great until a Senator pressures Amazon to drop your site.

AKA the Denial of Democracy attack.

There are always a few vulnerable points. Even Amazon can go down if you chose the right point of attack as the past has shown.

http://mashable.com/2009/12/24/ddos-attack-amazon/

That's not Amazon, but yes, attacks on DNS providers work.

The same way all CDNs handle DDoS attacks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com