Web Operations

Trust Nobody

Just as the most reliable datacenters go down from time to time, you can expect even the best third-party vendors to have issues now and then.

In 2006, a company by the name of Blue Security came up with an innovative way to fight spammers. By installing the Blue Frog client on your computer, every spam message you got would result in a polite request emailed to the spammer, asking him to stop. The hope was that the spammers, to avoid being overwhelmed by the flood of messages from half a million Blue Frog clients, would simply exclude those recipients from future spam campaigns. Instead, the spammers chose to fight back. A war of escalation ensued. In the end, the spammers fired off a massive DDoS attack against Blue's DNS provider, UltraDNS. By taking out UltraDNS, they took out Blue Security. Blue gave up the fight at this point, and folded. Unfortunately, that's not the whole story. Because UltraDNS hosts a large number of high-profile customers, the battle resulted in significant collateral damage. Innocent bystanders such as Tucows and Six Apart were taken offline in the process, through no fault of their own. Incidents such as this continue to happen, including several massive attacks in 2009 that caused secondary outages to companies such as Amazon and Salesforce.com.

The short story is that you can't put all your faith in a single vendor, especially if the vendor is hosting multiple companies. Someone else might get attacked, and through no fault of your own, ...