[[PageOutline]]

This intrastructure overview is part of a four part series originally developed as part of the 2015 Membership Meeting.

[wiki:orientation Orientation] | [wiki:privacy Privacy] | [wiki:movement Movement]

= Instrastructure =

Many people are aware of the extended denial of service attack against May First/People Link last summer. This page reviews what happened and explains how May First/People Link infrastructure can withstand these kinds of attacks.

== What happened? ==

 * In late July 2015 Planned Parenthood's federal funding came under attack. This political attack was accompanied by a Internet attack targetting Planned Parenthood and many other abortion providers and supporters, including the National Network of Abortion Funders (an MF/PL Member)
 * Firsts:
  * First time we experienced such a sophisticated combination of political and technical attacks.
  * First time the attack targeted MF/PL itself

== Questions ==

 * What is a denial of service attack? Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhA9PAfkJ10
 * Does that mean our servers were compromised? No, denial of service attackers do not gain access to data
 * Who attacked us? Can we prosecute them? We don't know and will probably never find out.
 * How did we defend ourselves?
  * Filtering: we now have the capability of filtering traffic before it enters our network
  * 10 times more bandwidth: we went from 100Mbits/second to 1Gbit/second. We typically use about 5% of our available bandwidth, leaving plenty of room for spikes.
  * Moved sensitive servers (DNS servers) to locations that can withstand up to 50Gbits of traffic

== More info ==
 * DNS Amplification attack explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTKjHWkDwP0 (technical)