CloudFlare comes back online after weekend router crash

March 04, 2013

CloudFlare's Juniper routers choked on a slight programming change designed to deflect a distributed denial-of-service attack, knocking the company's services off the Internet for about an hour early Sunday morning. The San Francisco-based company provides a service that speeds up the delivery of web pages and reduces bandwidth. It also provides a suite of security tools that helps website owners identify and filter malicious traffic. CEO Matthew Prince wrote that a bug in its routers caused its services to effectively drop off the Internet around 1:47 a.m. PST on Sunday. The routers had been modified with a new rule, or a type of filter, intended to deflect a DDOS attack underway against one of its customers. CloudFlare saw that the attack used data packets that appeared to be between 99,971 and 99,985 bytes, far larger than the 500- to 600-byte average. The company's engineers wrote a rule for the routers to drop the extra large packets, which was then distributed to the routers using the Flowspec protocol, Prince wrote. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2029990/cloudflare-comes-back-online-after-weekend-router-crash.html