Blog posts tagged with 'load balancer'

In case you missed it there is a really interesting story circulating on the Net, best told by Jim Louderback the CEO of Revision3 and victim of a DDOS attack over Memorial day weekend ( his Blog & CNET interview ). If you're a fan of Revision3 you already know that they got taken off-line for 3 days, if your not you may want to check out their site. They represent perhaps the best example of new Media and the future of TV, including HD video, channels, live and on-demand, etc, all delivered via the web. In order to achieve high quality video Revision3 utilizes BitTorrent technology legitimately for distributing content to users. The problem came about when a "legitimate" media tracking company identified a Revision3 server as a potential source of " questionable " BitTorrent traffic. Once Revision3 was made aware of this situation ( by a forum poster ) they appropriately locked down the server, what happened next was the strange part...

As reported by Revision3, the media tracking company ( presumably automatically ) launched a DDOS attack on Revision3's site flooding it with as many as 8,000 packets per second taking down the site by exceeding the capacity of limited web servers. Complicating the matter was the long weekend and unreachable staff at the offending company. Once they were finally able to get in contact the company stopped the attack and they both started to unravel what had happened.

The NetScaler system may not be positioned as protection from "good" guys ( vs. typical bad guys ) but this situation exemplifies why it is worth consideration as part of a comprehensive protection plan. That is why web based media companies like MSN, CNET, Digg, and many others rely on NetScaler's to protect their infrastructure. Among other features NetScaler protects sites from SYN flood DDOS attacks by handling all requests and only forwarding legitimate ticketed traffic to the web server, all other SYN flood requests are dropped before ever reaching the company Web Servers.

So for the next review of your security infrastructure, keep in mind who are the "good" or bad guys and are you protected either way.

Many news reports have recently identified the increased threat to web sites and applications from SQL injections, the most recent example being the Nihaorr1 script that resulted in over 600,000 sites being infected even including the Department of Homeland Security and the UN. Although initially identified as a Windows IIS server vulnerability, the root cause of the recent exposure goes beyond IIS and has identified lax web application coding as the culprit. A Register interview with the DHS assistant secretary for Cybersecurity is quoted as saying " our networks are only as strong as the weakest link " which makes sense but also identifies how vulnerable web applications are on the web. If a company is relying on the variability of programmer security knowledge and limited QA testing to protect their web app from yet to be defined threats, it's no wonder that so many sites are exposed and hacked. 

Perhaps one of the ways to better protect an organization from the next undefined attack is to look at minimizing the impact of variability. A common best practice in the manufacturing industry is to evaluate every process and implement techniques and tools to reduce variability so as not be overly dependent on a final test or inspection which always has some level of escapes. This is the core of the Six Sigma  technique that many world class manufacturers utilize to improve product quality.  

As applied to IT protecting Web Applications, a tool that can be implemented to reduce the impact of programmer variability is to utilize a Web App firewall such the positive security model feature of the NetScaler Application Firewall. This feature recognizes best coding practices for HTML and Industry HTTP standards and automatically blocks Web App behavior and variations outside a known-good model. The result is a significant reduction in the risk created by variable programmer skills and expensive but incomplete QA testing.  In the specific example of the Nihaorr1 attack, a recent test validated that the NetScaler Firewall was indeed able to block the Nihaorr1 script using the default configurations. Additionally the learning features of the App Firewall can be used for more granular configurations and protection as well.  

So before the next threat to your web applications is discovered, it may be worth further investigation as to the human influence of variability in IT operations and consider steps to mitigate the risks.