Amazon Web Services which is the world’s largest cloud service provider was hit by a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service) resulting outage for some parts of the service for several hours.
What Happened?
The attack has been confirmed and acknowledged by Amazon and have revealed that the attack lasted for about 8 hours which began from 10:30 AM to 6:30 PM. Although the attack was directed towards its Route 53 DNS web service, other services of it were also affected including its S3, Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Queue Service (SQS), CloudFront, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service.
It has been reported that the DDoS attack affected businesses using the service. Like, A US-based company which goes by the name of DigitalOcean was also affected. DigitalOcean issued the following statement regarding the attack:
“Our engineering team is continuing to monitor the issue impacting accessibility to S3/RDS/ELB/EC2 resources across all regions. We continue to monitor the situation closely, and we will post an update as soon as the issue is fully resolved.”
The most ironical part about all this is that Amazon provides its DDoS protection service called Sheild Advanced. Despite this, they were unable to prevent the attack. However, the service did help them in mitigating the damage. They also stated the same.
“Our DDoS mitigations are absorbing the vast majority of this traffic, but these mitigations are also flagging some legitimate customer queries at this time.”
Coincidentally, Google’s Cloud Service was also affected by some problems which were not a DDoS attack. No connection was found between the two outages.
The Aftermath
The source of the attack has still not been identified. However, AWS should make it a point to strengthen their security so that attacks like these do not occur more frequently. It does not shine a good light on Amazon, which is one of the biggest companies in the world.
This is not even the first time a company has experienced such attacks. A US college suffered the same type of attack for around 4 hours and even Ukraine’s National Postal Service was attacked.
