Instrastructure

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

Orientation: 1:00 - 1:45 pm | Privacy: 2:00 - 2:45pm | Infrastructure: 3:00 - 3:45 pm | Movement: 4:00 - 4:45 pm

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)