As some of you may have noticed, we recently suffered two rather large distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) that were targeted at customers on our network. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with what a DDoS is, these are generally malicious network attacks designed to flood a network or host with specially crafted data packets that are intended to make the network or host inaccessible to legitimate users. You may have heard of these on the news when large company sites suddenly stop working and "hacktivist" groups like Anonymous are mentioned. There is often a political or other policy motivation behind these groups. Unfortunately, these are not always very easy to stop or prevent due to the way the Internet Protocol (IPv4) is currently designed.
We want to let you know that we have already been planning a large network upgrade with our upstream provider and that should make us less vulnerable to these attacks in the future. By increasing our upstream connection by a factor of 10, this gives our network better ability to absorb large disruptive traffic bursts. We are also currently working with our network engineering team to improve the tools we have to deal with these attacks, especially with the level of sophistication we have recently seen increasing. This has made some of these attacks much more difficult to pinpoint and block.
We can understand the frustration anytime there are network issues but want you to know we are diligently working on constantly improving our systems to provide you with a better customer experience.
