Is it possible to attack datacenters with DoS?

Are data centers secure from DoS ?
what are the measures we should take to prevent DoS

 

No, I don't believe so. They can try but datacenters would be right back up.

 

yep, used to work in a web hosting company.. and it's not new.

 

Yes, you can "attack" anything, but in most cases they won't have enough power to significantly slow down a whole DC.

 

Well datacenters can be hit by ddos attacks but the effectiveness on them is not as great compared to one particular site. The attack will try to flood all the provider internet connections they have. Now most providers have multiple carriers coming in making it much harder to cause any very serious issues. But it sure can cause packet loss and things of that nature if the attack is big enough to cause load to their routers and possibly congest some of their connections.

 

ofcorse... you can attake anything , but it will be hard (much zombies needed)

 

DCs can be hit by DDos attacks but you can prevent it by using hardware firewall protections. So it's difficult to get across. Also DCs are constantly monitored [24/7] by skilled technicians. I haven't heard of DCs under any attacks recently.

 

You cant prevent it with a hardware firewall.Use cisco netstalker whatever you want.DDos uses different ips.

 

Unfortunately, not every data center is secure. First, find out what security measures they employ.

Very true.

One would hope...Some are surprisingly lax on security, so make sure this is in fact true. A while back, a colleague of mine had one where this wasn't true and they experienced a horrible DDOS attack, as did most of the sites in that data center.

 

if your worried.. use authentication on your routers

 

Thanks for the reply

 

Ive seen before some Dos attacks

 

DoS attacks work by preventing legitimate users from accessing a service. This is usually accomplished by starvation or monopolisation of a resource.

In English, this means that the attacker is using up all of the CPU or the RAM or the bandwidth or the disk space (or something else like those mentioned). There are ways other than resource starvation of causing a DoS such as making a request that causes the server to crash. Apache is quite robust in the face of this sort of attack but other services such as PHP or Tomcat or the Database server can be the weak link. I have seen certain requests that will cause even Apache to segfault and when that happens, you get a midnight phone call to tell you that your server is down.

At my work, a favourite prank is to attempt to log in as another user (the "target" of your attack) three times which will lock them out of their own machine. They will need to phone IT to have their account unlocked. This is yet another form of DoS.

If we are talking about a datacentre, there are plenty of different ways to deny their normal service. The one my website is hosted at is on the border of two power grids and has UPS systems and it's own backup generators so knocking their power out wouldn't work but not many datacentres have all that. We had a problem at my work recently where the builders next door dug through our internet connection. It was an unintentional DoS but it was still a DoS.

Lastly, if we are just talking about flooding an IP address with traffic, there are still a great many places where the resource starvation could happen. Maybe you have a very powerful machine that could handle all the requests but your switch can only handle 100MBits/s. Maybe the datacentre's bandwidth is capped at 1000MBits/s. Maybe there is a single route into the datacentre that can be flooded. Maybe by spoofing IP address sources the attacker can fool some key routers into thinking that the target is the one flooding the internet and hence blocking traffic from the target.

In short, there are many ways to attack any target and although datacentres are a difficult target there are people out there with the means to succeed in attacking them. The only way to be sure of surviving a DDoS is to make sure that your resources are plentiful enough that they cannot be monopolised.

A more cost-effective way of achieving this is to wait for a DoS and then employ a specialist company to deal with it for you. Hopefully you will not be the target of an attack and you will not need to spend the money at all.

 

Hundreds/thousands of zombies woule be required to flood.

 

It can be done ... !! zombies zombies zombies zombies is all u need !!

Just don't challenge some one to Dos ur site or Dc !

 

How many zombies?

 

Of course it depends..

1. What are the zombies on? 56k modem, 512k, 10mbit? or maybe 1gbit dedicated bandwidth? (1gigabit = 18'724 56k modems)
2. What's the data center's bandwidth?

Imo you wouldn't need so awfully many zombies (this is hypothetically of course), just target web sites since many web masters care shit about their security hence they're an easy prey, and many of those are hosted on shared or dedicated boxes with 100Mbit BW.

And seeing DDOS attacks aren't anything fancy y'know. It sucks seeing script kiddies finding nothing so they resort to DDOS - aka the lamest way

.. Sorry, kinda off topic from what the thread author wanted.

 

I seem to recall a xmas a couple of years ago in our DC where a group got hold of 12 servers and proceeded to DOS another DC. As a result our pipes were tied up in an attack on a larger DC and as such all our sites were down.

 

Its too many too handle.

 

Yes you can ddos a datacentre but the good one usually have multiple ironport or cisco firewalls at point of entry which detect attacks and can put that traffic into a blackhole. They would usually have additionalhardware that monitors and manages ddos attacks.

I do believe that some countries a malicious ddos attack is illegal and is considered the same as hacking, which is also illegal of course in any country.