Comment by paxtonab
10 years ago
"This was a collective decision taken by all impacted companies"
I think they were put under pressure by other companies using the same IPS, not their customers.
10 years ago
"This was a collective decision taken by all impacted companies"
I think they were put under pressure by other companies using the same IPS, not their customers.
That's even weirder. They have obligations to their customers not to their neighbors in the same DC, that's the territory of whoever handles their hosting.
The datacenter is not going to be happy if they are offline due to attacks targeting one of their customers. The datacenter has an obligation to their customers, and if that means cutting off ProtonMail so that other customers stay online, then that's what the datacenter has to do. Then, ProtonMail is under pressure to pay the ransom fee to avoid having services terminated by the datacenter.
This is a risk the datacenter exposes their customers to by nature of how they operate. It's a major selling point to me that AWS employs some more sophisticated countermeasures to attacks like these. If their typical response to ransom requests was "you need to consider how you're impacting our business", I would take my business elsewhere.
3 replies →
>that's the territory of whoever handles their hosting.
Yes. And what does a provider do when a customer is getting hit so hard by a ddos that it is pushing their other customers offline? they blackhole the target at their upstream (usually starting on a per-IP basis, but that will widen as the attacker shifts the target)
So... most likely, the isp said "if this continues, we will need to finish the job and shut you off" - which is what every other ISP is going to do in the case of an attack that is large enough to knock the ISP in question offline.
Check out the legalese on your hosting contract; everyone reserves the right to dump you as a customer in these sorts of cases.
Yes, absolutely. And that's acceptable. If your customers can't deal with the realities of the internet today then you're better off without them anyway, no service will be able to guarantee 100% uptime and if major banks can be taken out by DDoS then so can a small time operator like this. That's no news and should not suprise anybody.
Would those obligations be spelled out in the contract for data centre services?
I'm interested in whether the ISPs have any form of protection against the disruption caused by a customer of a shared service coming under a criminal attack of this kind.