19/1/08 gateways troubles

[#1]

snip from one of the service status on this.
(Our network engineers have now isolated the cause of the problem which is believed to be due to a targeted denial of service attack on one of our customers. We are in the process of getting in contact with this user and will continue to monitor the situation overnight)
a dos attack on one customer can cause a edge router to be over used and bring browsing web to crawl/stop all all togther for all users?

[#2]

Yep, a Distributed dos attack can do that!

[#3]

Routers run an OS just like any other device.
Cisco, Juniper (whose routers PN use to terminate the pipes) and other try and build in a fair amount of mitigation into their software and hardware platforms but like any software, it will fail if overloaded with requests.

[#4]

Unfortunately it can, and occassionally does, happen. Hopefully everyone is now back online after the issues today.

[#5]

Evening Chris
Were the issues lingering into the evening as I was bumped off about 6 and it took a while to recover or was it just likely to be my dodgy line.

[#6]

The drops were, AFAIK, only happening earlier in the day. There may have been some residual issues if alot of people were trying to get online at the same time but I wouldn't have thought so.

[#7]

Just thought you may have been rebooting one or more of the edge routers about that time and the ADSL light came up red on my router, strange.

[#8]

i was woken up by the family this moring saying they couldnt get on the internet. so draged me self down strairs to see the tray icon with a little world over the pc icon thinking to my self nope the internets fine and passing jokes of at the family for being stupid only to find no webpages would load.
eat some humble pie they said to me.
i could do a dns look up from the router config page. so just disconnected from PN and back again to jump gateways which worked.
was going to post on the forum about it but checked the service status just b4 i did and found you where all ready on top of it.
no call from pn to me so wasnt me that was getting dos attacked thank god.
was this a big dos attack to effect the edge router or just like you say the software had a paddy about this average sized dos attack?

[#9]

I'd say it'd have to be fairly sizeable to bring it down yes.
Wasn't me either.

[#10]

This is the kit they're using http://www.juniper.net/products_and_services/e_series_broadband_service/index.html