Whirlpool founder unfazed by DDoS attack
Whirlpool's founder Simon Wright has said he's unfazed by the 10-hour downtime for the broadband discussion forum website this morning following a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack last night.
"Given that the site isn't driven by a profit motive, I'm not really fazed by a few hours of downtime," Wright said.
Wright said the site's downtime this morning might have given users an excuse to do other things.
"Perhaps a few more people went outside this morning; that can only be a good thing!"
Lorenzo Modesto, chief operating officer for the website's hosting service Bulletproof Networks, told ZDNet Australia that it had first alerted its customers to the attack at 12:46am this morning.
"Bulletproof received monitoring alerts of packet loss at 12:45am. We identified it as a classic denial-of-service attack being targeted at Whirlpool," he said. "We immediately blocked Whirlpool IP addresses to observe it better and then we were able to track down that [the attackers] were originating from Denmark and the United States."
The service for other Bulletproof customers was only affected for around an hour, but Whirlpool was left offline until around 8am this morning. When the Bulletproof operations team attempted to bring Whirlpool back online, the service went down within a minute.
"We unblocked them at 8am and within a minute or two, the denial-of-service attack was back on," Modesto said, highlighting that Bulletproof's upstream providers Internode and Pacific Network were able to quickly resolve the issue.
"We escalated the issue to block it upstream with our upstream providers," he said. "Once we provided them with the source IP addresses they actually blocked those IP addresses upstream."
Neither Wright nor Modesto could give any reasons as to why Whirlpool might have been targeted. Modesto said with "hundreds of thousands of users", the site's public profile could have been a factor but said such problems had been rare since Bulletproof began hosting the forum.
"I believe it happened more when Whirlpool were with WebCentral," Modesto said.