Interesting People mailing list archives
more on Blackout hits major Web sites|ZDNet Must-Read News Alerts
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 06:23:10 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Jim Balter <jim () balter name> Date: June 17, 2004 3:43:08 AM EDT To: dave () farber net, Ip <ip () v2 listbox com>Subject: Re: [IP] more on Blackout hits major Web sites|ZDNet Must-Read News Alerts
On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 08:43:55 -0400 David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:
Begin forwarded message: From: "Patrick W.Gilmore" <patrick () ianai net> Date: June 16, 2004 1:38:20 AM EDT To: dave () farber net Cc: "Patrick W.Gilmore" <patrick () ianai net>Subject: Re: [IP] Blackout hits major Web sites|ZDNet Must-Read News AlertsDISCLAIMER: I work for Akamai Technologies.Which is also why I know Mr. Song is showing himself to be an idiot, making sweeping accusations on assumptions which do not correlate to reality.-- TTFN, patrick On Jun 15, 2004, at 4:53 PM, David Farber wrote:Blackout hits major Web sites Google, Microsoft.com and others go dark after an apparent outage of Akamai's domain name server system. Yahoo Mail still patchy. http://ct.com.com/click?q=c8-2lPnQWOJdK75YyzznoSPFel9u29RThis is brilliant: <quote>"It was definitely some sort of Akamai issue," Song said in an interview. "Their name service for all these major sites stopped working. You couldn't reach these sites, even though the sites were up. You just couldn't get to them because the name resolution wasn't working."Furthermore, Song noticed that Web-wide traffic during the outage actually declined, making it unlikely that Google and the other sites were the victims of a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which thousands of unknowing PC "slaves" would have flooded their servers with useless data or requests for data.</quote>Did Mr. Song consider the possibility that the DoS attack was pointed at the name servers? Especially since both Keynote and Akamai mention that there was an attack on Akamai's name service. And if so, wouldn't that have the effect of lowering "Web-wide traffic"? He himself admits that users cannot get to web sites if the name resolution is not working.
Mr. Gilmore seems to affirm Mr. Song's position -- that it was "some sort of Akamai issue", specifically "name service", i.e., an attack on Akamai's name servers, rather than an attack on "four sites that happened to be Akamai customers", as stated by Akamai's spokesman Jeff Young. Contrary to Mr. Gilmore's statement, Akamai did not "mention that there was an attack on Akamai's name service" -- not in the quoted article. Rather, "Akamai said the strike against those customers in turn caused a failure of its own domain name server (DNS) system". Rather than "both Keynote and Akamai" mentioning anything, the article says "Other parties may not agree with that assessment." The disagreement appears to be whether customers were struck causing Akamai's DNS to go down (the position of Akamai's spokesman), or Akamai's DNS was struck, causing customers to be unreachable (the position of Keynote, Mr. Song, and apparently Mr. Gilmore). I think Patrick Gilmore should be a bit more cautious in using terms like "idiot" and "this is brilliant", which play into a widely held perception of Akamai as "arrogant".(My disclaimer -- I'm a former employee of Sandpiper/Digital Island/Exodus/Cable&Wireless, a competitor and co-litigant of
Akamai, and had plenty of occasion to form such a perception.)
Not sure I would want to purchase products from a security company whose "security architect" does not understand the interaction between DNS and HTTP....
There's no evidence that he does not understand that. The decline in traffic suggests that the attack was against Akamai's name servers, not against "four sites", a point on which Mr. Song and Mr. Gilmore appear to agree. -- Jim Balter ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
Current thread:
- more on Blackout hits major Web sites|ZDNet Must-Read News Alerts David Farber (Jun 17)