The kind people at the university are not only providing the above statement to the students but are also including a detailed description of the actions being taken to counteract it. at the bottom of the message.
I wouldn't normally share but as it has gone to several thousand already
"On Monday 7 December at 9.24 a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack caused unplanned disruption on the Janet network. This resulted in a potentially intermittent service for all customers. Our network and computer security incident response teams are currently working to resolve the problem.
Network Operations Centre (NOC) engineers working closely with CSIRT, our security team, are implementing measures to reduce or stop the impact of these attacks. Each takes time to identify and to apply effective blocks. Once the blocks are applied the attack is brought under control but when this is spotted by the perpetrators the dynamics of the attacks change.
Due to their approach we have stopped putting out detailed Twitter messages since we believe our Twitter feeds were being monitored and the attackers were using this information to change attack vectors.
The reason why these attacks are so disruptive is that Janet infrastructure address space is being targeted. With such high capacity links, the amount of traffic that can be targeted at a core router's internal addresses will cripple such a router which are not designed to cope themselves with service traffic but designed to switch packets through very quickly.
We have now removed visibility to our infrastructure by blocking diagnostic facilities
(Removed sensitive content)
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We would appreciate it if you did not make this information public as that might cause further attacks against the network."
This is what happens when Network guys are put in charge of Security. please discuss!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
