We've been seeing significant attack activity from Amazon over the last
two months, involving apparently compromised instances that commonly
send 1-10G of traffic per source and together generate Nx10G of total
traffic. Even when our overall upstream capacity exceeds an attack's
overall size, the nature of load-balancing over multiple 10G upstream
links means that an individual link can be saturated by multiple large
flows, forcing our systems to null-route the target to limit impact.
We've sent an abuse notification about every traffic source to Amazon,
and specific sources seem to stop their involvement over time
(suggesting that abuse teams are following up on them), but there is an
endless parade of new attackers, and each source participates in many
damaging attacks before it is shut down.
Is there anyone at Amazon who can help with an engineering solution in
terms of programmatically detecting and rate-limiting attack traffic
sources, to our networks or overall? Or applying the kludge of a
rate-limit for all Amazon traffic to our networks? Or working with us on
some other option?
At least one other large cloud provider has an automatic rate-limiting
system in place that is effective in reducing the damage from repeat
high-volume attacks.
Emails to the Amazon NOC, peering contacts (since that would be another
possible solution), and abuse department have not connected me with anyone.
Thanks,
John
- Amazon network engineering contact? re: DDoS traffic John Weekes
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