DDOS today

We have very fat pipes for Net253 internet service. We buy enough bandwidth to keep our utilization at less than 25% of our average 5 minute rate. This means we never are slow. If your internet is slow, it is almost surely due to your home networking or the site/service you are connecting to.

Because our service is so fast, we have safety trips in place that will send traffic for a destination into the bit bucket (null route). This happens at our peering point, NoaNet. NoaNet peers at the top level of the internet for the west coast. We exchange at the meet me room at the Westin Exchange building, the Seattle SIX, and two other POPs (Olympia and Tacoma). These interchanges are 40,000 or 100,000mbit links. Let that sink in; we offer 100 and 1000mbit service options that we feed with at least 40,000mbits out of county.

Today, one customer had his IP address “null routed” twice. Each time, his address was “null routed” for 30 minutes to break DDOS attacks. The first attack was UDP packet flood of 28,000mbits. The second flat lined a mainline at 40,000mbits. Without these automatic triggers in place, these sort of attacks would take down every customer in Kitsap County on the KPUD system (Fire/Police/911/iFiber/Advanced Stream/Net253/all commercial dedicated internet/ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile cell towers) you get the drift.

It is possible to “buy” a DDOS attack. It is known to be used by angry “gamers” as a retaliatory for poor sportsmanship when playing video games. If you have gamers in the house, please talk to them about treating people with compassion online, and not falling under the illusion of “its internet, I am invincible”. Besides the obvious inconvenience of your service being shut off for 30 minutes by a robot, it does put a stress on our state’s infrastructure as a whole.