9 ms·
Pastie.org host pulls hosting after DDoS attack
- veeti 15y agoSounds like an opportunity for the other managed Rails hosts.
- callmeed 15y agoRight, especially considering EngineYard and Blue Box are here at RailsConf
- justadude6 15y agomaybe they teamed up at the conference
- seanp2k2 15y ago>"Sounds like an opportunity for the other managed Rails hosts." They can play it up, but if you throw enough bandwidth at /any/ host, they'll null route you. Other hosts (at least, the not-stupid ones who have been in this position before) know this and (hopefully) wouldn't sling mud at them over this.
- sha90 15y agoNobody is slinging mud for taking the site down temporarily. At least, without knowing the details of the attack, I don't think anyone is suggesting that there should have been zero downtime. The mud is being slung by those who don't appreciate a host dropping a client (paid or not) because of a single incident. That shows a complete lack of loyalty to your clients, again, paid or not. RM could have found a more reasonable way to drop pastie, if it really could handle the mix of takedown notices and network disruptions, but they didn't need to do it in the middle of the night with zero notice to the owner. Certainly they could have at least given him some time to migrate his stack and not have to leave all of pastie's users out in the cold --- not that it's such an essential service, but still...
- petercooper 15y agoActually, I think it might be a better opportunity for GitHub, given they have Gist. Or maybe the audiences are already too similar, dunno.
- jackolas 15y agoI really enjoyed this, the user experience is very nice and its a well designed site. I tend to use Gist now because its improved and I have a client for it, but this is a shame to see.
- bryanl 15y agoThis is a good chance to move over to http://gist.github.com http://gist.github.com for all your pasting needs.
- petercooper 15y agoI use both Gist and pastie.org. While I prefer Gist and wish it would just add support for disposable gists (without making me log out!), pastie.org is awesome for the disposable stuff on IRC, etc.
- res0nat0r 15y agoHastebin is pretty awesome too. http://hastebin.com/ http://hastebin.com/
- postfuturist 15y agoDDOS attacks are a fact of life, nice to know that Rails Machine will throw you under the bus when one happens. Doesn't seem to fit their homepage description: "You write Rails apps. We deploy, manage, support, monitor, and scale them. Done."
- jsprinkles 15y agoSo if someone throws multiple tens of gigabits at your customer, and your upstream threatens to turn off your entire hosting company, you would respond "no way, we're going the extra mile for our customer"? Rails Machine was, in all likelihood, compelled to act to either (a) preserve its relationship with is upstream or (b) preserve its relationship with its other paying customers that do not attract DoS attacks. Your idealism will fall down quickly when one annoying customer threatens service for every last one of your clients: it becomes a "do I continue to get paid or do I fight for this customer" equation. Price out mitigation equipment and the multiple high-level engineers you will need to administer it before you respond telling me how wrong I am, by the way. The gear alone is an engineer's salary just to get started. Edit: Fine, I dropped the Amazon example.
- jayzee 15y agoAmazon did not drop Wikileaks fearing DDOS attacks. They dropped Wikileaks fearing Lieberman.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- seanp2k2 15y ago>"Noteworthy: Getting attacked is against ToS at many hosts." Yes, and the action we take is largely dependent on the magnitude of the attack and how it affects /other/ clients.
- saurik 15y agoI don't remember it being about either DDoS (if anything, I thought they went to Amazon to avoid the DDoS, seemingly somewhat successfully) or "ToS" (which to me has an implication that Amazon decided they didn't like the service, as opposed to caving under the pressure of other people not liking the service). http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/12/wikileaks-kicked-out-of-amazons-cloud.ars http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/12/wikileaks-kicke... > The Wikileaks website migrated to Amazon's cloud hosting service yesterday after being hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Amazon decided to discontinue serving the controversial website this morning in response to pressure from critics, including prominent members of Congress. ... Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, was among the congressmen who pressured Amazon to stop hosting Wikileaks. He told AFP this morning that he plans to question Amazon about its relationship with Wikileaks.
- pestaa 15y agoI can not understand these attacks. Why block a service that is free of charge, useful and did no harm? Unless of course this DDoS was not targeted, which makes even less sense to me. Also, why did Rails Machine throw out the site so quickly? If I choose to sponsor someone out of my free will, I'd do so without distinction from paying customers.
- 0x0 15y agoJust guessing, but maybe someone didn't like the content of a stored public "pastie"?
- pestaa 15y ago... and had too much time on their hands. Seriously, when something is offending me, I contact the author and webmaster first. Not take the whole cluster down.
- 0x0 15y agoMaybe they did to no effect, or maybe the content was of such nature that they didn't want to draw any extra attention to it. Pure speculation of course, but no matter the reason, they achieved the intended end result "efficiently".
- yew 15y agoIt is actually cheaper to launch a DDoS attack then to talk to the webmaster, if you already control enough zombies and value your personal time highly enough. The attack might have been launched for the fun of it, too. Why not, when you won't be affected personally?
- gojomo 15y agoIn such a case, those who launch the DDoS may have no legal/legitimate grounds to take some disfavored content down. (Perhaps it is embarassing to their prophet, government, guru, criminal enterprise, or movement.) They may have asked for material to be taken down, and the hoster said, "no, it's legal content" – at which point the DDoS is launched as both primary censorship (disabling access to the whole site) and censorship-by-blackmail ("take it down or your whole site stays down"). On the other hand, it's also possible that the originators of the DDoS are angry about something the hoster did take down. Perhaps they'd put up material against the rules, Pastie took it down, and in a tantrum after-the-fact, they decided to retaliate with a "well if you won't host our stuff we'll block eveyone". (This is a bit more like the Anonymous DDoS against payment services they didn't like.) Without a statement from those involved, it can be hard to determine DDoSer motivations, but those are some common patterns.
- heliostatic 15y agoPerhaps an opportunity for Cloudflare to offer support?
- dknecht 15y agoWe would love to help, and have offered.
- heliostatic 15y agoAwesome; I hope Josh is able to get things back online. I'm curious how much support or assistance Rails Machine offered prior to pulling hosting.
- seanp2k2 15y ago>"I'm curious how much support or assistance Rails Machine offered prior to pulling hosting." Me too, just out of curiosity, but if you have an attack that is large enough to be affecting other clients, you can't usually wait around too long for the targeted client to respond (and even if they did, there isn't typically much you can do for a large attack.) How long? I'd say about 5 minutes. The typical attack we see rises up over the course of a few minutes and lasts 6-48 hours.
- jsprinkles 15y agoI'm looking at the "Compare Plans" page; is DDoS Mitigation part of another feature that I missed, or is it implicit in the service (i.e., a side effect of having a good CDN)? I can ask that an easier way: if my site takes a 10 Gbps hit, which plan would mitigate it? Enterprise? Do you bill for the transfer that you eat? Genuinely curious and haven't really looked around the site much, and you guys hit my radar when you took on Lulzsec. Can't imagine the plethora of nasties directed at their gear.
- knewter 15y agoClearly the gist.github engineers DDoSed them - it's all so clear!
- datums 15y agoThis behavior of unplugging the destination of the DDoS is common with smaller hosts. They don't have the capital to spend on expensive mitigation devices. There are times when these attacks affect their entire network (bad design), so their quick and fast solution is to null route you at their cores.
- sha90 15y agoThe issue isn't unplugging, I don't think anybody here thinks that it is unreasonable if they were to do this. The issue is that they kept the site unplugged for good because a single DDoS attack. My analysis based on the official response is that they used this incident as an excuse to drop the site because it was too much of a hassle to deal with the takedown notices.
- codexon 15y agoIt isn't an issue of expensive mitigation devices. Even expensive and large hosts like Softlayer will null route you. They just don't want to pay bandwidth or go through the hassle of asking their upstream providers to filter the attack for them.
- rickmb 15y ago"Smaller hosts" like this are imho companies that sell a service they are fundamentally unable of actually maintaining. And they are usually not very transparent about it.
- mattmanser 15y agoI don't know about the scale of the DDoS attacks but have you tried cloudflare?
- tristanoneil 15y agoIf you're looking for more of a minimal snippet experience there's always http://marked.cc http://marked.cc
- tvh2k 15y agoUnless you're pasting code. Check out my trivial example: http://www.marked.cc/4f9766f05e69190001000017 http://www.marked.cc/4f9766f05e69190001000017
- tristanoneil 15y agoIt does support code snippets you just have to use fenced code blocks ala Github style. ``` x = [] ```
- nicksergeant 15y agoFWIW, apparently Rails Machine's CEO thinks some of Pastie's users are not-so-great: https://twitter.com/bradleyktaylor/status/194937146153508864 https://twitter.com/bradleyktaylor/status/194937146153508864
- avree 15y agoUh, he's not talking about all of Pastie's users, he's stating that Pastie has some bad users who use it maliciously and threaten the provider.
- nicksergeant 15y agoSorry, worded that wrong. Fixed.
- wrecked 15y agoI'd like to apologize to those who have been negatively impacted by my decision to pull support for Pastie (especially Josh). To understand why I made the decision to pull our support after 9 hours of multiple DDOS attacks, I'd like to share some background and our ops philosophy. It is important to understand that I put our existing customers that pay us to manage and scale their high growth revenue-generating web applications before all else. This is the core of our business and what they trust us to do. As we are seeing now, this means that I will protect them at the expense of making some non-customers and "risky" customers upset. Let me explain further... Rails Machine at this time is 6 people. Through a lot of tools like Moonshine, experience, and process we manage 100+ web applications. Please note that I did not say "host". Hosting is only part of the package. We commit to do whatever it takes to keep our customers' applications available and growing their business. Everyone in the organization is a developer on a varying scale of dev to ops including myself who started with Rails in 2005 and have been a professional dev for 20 years. Although not as quiet as we would like, in general the workload of responding to outages, bugs, scaling problems, and traffic bursts are managed by the team. We've been doing this for 6 years focused specifically on Rails and have seen most problems with Rails applications in production. This makes us fairly efficient in identifying and resolving issues. We've been hosting Pastie pretty much since the beginning and free of charge for several years. In the past two years, Pastie began to attract a lot of users intending to use it to do illegal things. This includes sharing stolen credit cards, stolen passwords, phishing schemes, copyrighted content, virus/trojan horses, hacker scripts, confidential corporate info, etc, etc. Please know that the overwhelming majority of Pastie's user base are well meaning folks who kindly follow Josh's basic rule of "using Pastie for good". A tiny minority however attract a lot of attention through their public pastes that ruin the experience for everyone else. Aside from the obvious problems, the public existence of this stuff makes a lot of people upset who in turn threaten us. This includes but not limited to criminals, giant corporations, angry individuals, trolls, and more importantly our data center/upstream provider. These upset people then send us nastygrams requiring us to take action or else. "Or else" includes suing us, arresting us, DDoSing us, and more importantly terminating our service. To avoid bad things happening to us and all of our other customers, we have to take action immediately. Every now then other customers get a spam notice or a DMCA notice but in general it happens once and not a huge deal. Pastie on the other hand generates 100s of abuse complaints. Abuse complaints that we can not ignore and require us to investigate and follow up on. While we are doing this, we are not helping the 100+ other customers that generate zero abuse complaints and most likely never will. Enter the DDos. Over the past 6 years, we've handled multiple DDoS attacks on different applications. Given that 95% of our customers are running revenue-generating business applications, we deal with a DDoS about once or maybe twice per year. They are really annoying and consume a lot of time and a lot of concurrent team members. Although we wish they never happened, as some have pointed out DDoS attacks are a fact of life. Many high profile sites with much larger teams and budgets have struggled for multiple days fighting waves of attacks. We accept this as part of our job. The problem in this particular instance is that these DDoS attacks on Pastie were a continuation of the stream of operational disruptions already being generated by the site. After handling the first attack with four of us covering all of the angles around 10pm and with the help of Internap's network team, we halted the attack. Within a few hours, it began again in the wee hours of the morning. At the same time, alerts for another customer who had entrusted us with their business came in. So a decision was made to halt the second attack as quickly as possible and focus on doing our job as we promised to the rest of our customers. We could have chosen to ride out multiple other attacks and engage in a lot of time consuming and expensive behavior to preserve a site that was already a source of ops disruption. Making that choice would have been inconsistent with our values and commitments. This decision was purely ops motivated to protect our team members ability to serve our core customers. Some of you are upset about this decision and I am sorry for that. I know 100+ customers that would approve. I put my customers and team first. Please feel free to reach out to me directly (email or twitter) if you would like to discuss this further. @bradleyktaylor, Founder, Rails Machine
- lotides 15y agoI know I'll get a lot of shit for this but good riddance. I hope it never comes back. I've felt this way since I found my stolen accounts posted on Pastie and they ignored requests to take it down.
- jmah 15y agoOnce they're on pastie, it's already too late.