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Cool Ideas refuses to bow to DDoS attacks, heightens security measures

September was a rather rocky month for Cool Ideas according to a mail sent out to customers this morning.

Customers may have noted their service was disrupted on three separate occasions this month – the 11th, 21st and 22nd of September to be precise.

These disruptions were caused by Distributed Denial of Service attack or DDoS. To be specific the type of attack that Cool Ideas was under is called a DNS Amplification Attack.

During a DNS Amplification Attack an open DNS is flooded with traffic so that when a legitimate user makes a request to say visit Twitter for example that request fails.

In the instance of the Cool Ideas attacks, its connection between London and South Africa was being flooded with traffic resulting in some websites and services being inaccessible.

During the attacks Cool Ideas enlisted help from Internet Solutions and it says it also made use of backup paths but ultimately the sheer scale of the attack was too much for it to handle.

As such Cool Ideas has had to put measures in place to deal with potential DDoS attacks in the future.

These measures include increasing bandwidth in London. The service provider will also add increased security which it explains by drawing comparisons to zombies on a highway.

“Legitimate visitors to our network will get a return-visa, essentially, and first-time visitors will get pushed to a side lane to inspect their potential zombie nature. Some of them will slip through if their visas are good enough fakes but not enough to clog our highways,” Cool Ideas explained.

The nature of these attacks makes it rather difficult to pinpoint ground-zero but Cool Ideas says that it will continue monitoring its network as it has always done to ensure threats are dealt with.

The fact of the matter is that DDoS attacks are commonplace, during September several cloud hosting providers and ISPs were hit. Game services such as Steam and Battle.Net are no strangers to DDoS attacks either.

Cool Ideas has said that it will endeavour to improve communication with its customer base and that it will not be swayed by attacks such as this.

“We won’t stand down, surrender or give up. We avail ourselves to the people and communities we engage with. This is what sets Cool Ideas apart from other ISPs and it feels good to do good,” the firm concluded.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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