Network Attack Mitigation

[Charles]

I know many of you are very curious how our cloud services work and how we manage things when we service thousands of Invision Community-powered sites on our platform.

I am writing this quick post because I just got an alert from our monitoring systems and signed on to see what was happening.

We use AWS WAF with both managed rules and our own, custom rule sets. With those both combined, we are able to filter a lot of malicious traffic. Sometimes people do attempt a direct attack on one of the communities we host. That is what is going on today.

As I am typing this, our WAF setup is blocking 10 million requests per minute on our network. Yet, even with that huge amount of inbound traffic, our actual operations are not impacted at all. This is one of the advantages  of a robust network backing your community.

I just thought I would share because 1. our monitoring summoned our team to look at "abnormal traffic" and 2. I thought you might find this interesting.

 

[Randy Calvert]

And here it is… a Saturday afternoon on a holiday weekend.  Attackers love to ruin weekend plans!

This is a fantastic confirmation of value!

[Charles]

Funny you say that. Holidays are always busy in terms of attacks and such. For example, we always make a point to keep a close watch on Christmas Day as there is always something.

[Randy Calvert]

Holidays (especially 4 day weekends) have been a super common attack time for my financial services customers for over a year. We actually have betting pools for what customer and what time!  

Attackers know when organizations are likely to be running on a skeleton crew and try to take advantage of it unfortunately.