News in Networking: DDoS Mitigations and VPNs in China and Russia

This week’s top story picks from the Kentik team.

DDoS attacks and their mitigation efforts are all over the news this week. A new Wired feature talks about how streaming giant Netflix tests against these disruptive attacks. Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan talks about how service providers need better DDoS mitigation. And new Kaspersky Lab research recognized a Chinese telecom as seeing the biggest DDoS attack in Q2. Also in the news this week, China and Russia both cracked down on VPN usage.

Here are those headlines and more:

• How Netflix DDoS’ed Itself to Protect the Entire Internet (Wired) In a Wired feature out this week, Scott Behrens, a security engineer at Netflix, talks about how the streaming giant tests DDoS attacks. According to the story, “Netflix engineers reroute customers away from a certain region of production servers so they can have a real-world sandbox in which to experiment. The process also helps ensure that Netflix can continue to provide service to its customers even if one of its regions goes down or experiences problems; during a Chaos Kong [test] all user traffic gets rerouted from a particular region, ideally without customers noticing.”
• Sophisticated DDoS Attacks Drive Service Providers to Seek Better Approach (Frost & Sullivan) A new report called “Service Provider Requirements for DDoS Mitigation” from Frost & Sullivan discusses how “DDoS attacks have become more formidable than ever, growing year-over-year in terms of scale, frequency and sophistication. As a result, service providers must revisit their DDoS defenses and strategies on a regular basis, on top of re-evaluating their effectiveness and ability to meet their needs.”
• Chinese Telecom DDoS Attack Breaks Record (Dark Reading) Two-hundred and 77 hours: that’s how long a DDoS attack on a Chinese telecom company lasted earlier this year, according to a new report published this week by Kaspersky Lab. The Lab team said the attack has “a 131% hourly increase compared to the longest attack recorded earlier this year.”
• This Typosquatting Attack on npm Went Undetected for 2 weeks (The Register) According to The Register, “A two-week-old campaign to steal developers’ credentials using malicious code distributed through npm, the Node.js package management registry, has been halted with the removal of 39 malicious npm packages.”
• Why SSL/TLS Attacks Are on the Rise (Computerworld) New research from Zscaler reports that “as enterprises get better about encrypting network traffic to protect data from potential attacks or exposure, online attackers are also stepping up their SSL/TLS game to hide their malicious activities.”
• Service Providers Rushing in to Provide Container Networking (TechTarget) TechTarget reminds, “It is no secret that container networking has been the new hotness in the development and open source world for the last couple of years.” Now, thanks to big networking vendors, container networking is also picking up momentum.
• China’s Internet Censors Play a Tougher Game of Cat and Mouse (The New York Times) China is known for its Great Firewall as a way to limit content from getting into its citizens’ hands. Now, the country is shutting down VPNs for tech-savvy citizens who know how to get around the wall. According to The New York Times, “In recent days, Apple has pulled apps that offer access to such tools — called virtual private networks, or VPNs — off its China app store, while Amazon’s Chinese partner warned customers on its cloud computing service against hosting those tools on their sites. Over the past two months, a number of the most popular Chinese VPNs have been shut down, while two popular sites hosting foreign television shows and movies were wiped clean.”
• Putin Bans VPNs to Stop Russians Accessing Prohibited Websites (Reuters) Also in an effort to ban access to certain websites and content, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law this week prohibiting VPNs.

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