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Submission + - How should one dealing with a DDoS attack?

Submitted by TheUnFounded
TheUnFounded writes: A site that I administer was recently "held hostage" for the vast sum of $800. We were contacted by a guy (who was, it turns out, in Lebanon), who told us that he had been asked to perform a DDoS on our site by a competitor, and that they were paying him $600. He then said for $800, he would basically go away. Not a vast sum, but we weren't going to pay just because he said he "could" do something.

Within 5 minutes, our site was down.

The owner of the company negotiated with the guy, and he stopped his attack after receiving $400. A small price to pay to get the site online in our case. But obviously we want to come up with a solution that'll allow us to deal with these kinds of attacks in the future.

While the site was down, I contacted our hosting company, Rackspace. They proceeded to tell me that they have "DDoS mitigation services", but they cost $6,000 if your site is under attack at the time you use the service. Once the attack was over, the price dropped to $1500. (Nice touch there Rackspace, so much for Fanatical support; price gouging at its worst).

So, obviously, I'm looking for alternative solutions for DDoS mitigation. I'm considering CloudFlare (https://www.cloudflare.com/) as an option; does anyone have any other suggestions or thoughts on the matter?

Comment Re:So, sue the developer for the cost he caused. (Score 1) 267

by TheUnFounded (#40945021) Attached to: Wall Street and the Mismanagement of Software
I assume this was tounge-in-cheek, but realistically, we're actually headed that way. Licensing boards for software developers, etc. The problem is, as a software developer, it's much more costly to fix 100% of bugs than it is to fix 98% and not worry about that last 2%. If we held every developer to task for every bug in software, we'd have a whole lot less software written, and what would be written would cost 10x as much.
Biotech

Russian Scientists Revive Plant From 30,000-Year-Old Seeds 162

Posted by Soulskill from the to-make-a-new-type-of-vodka dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It was an Ice Age squirrel's treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species. The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated, the researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds. ... 'The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber,' said Stanislav Gubin, one of the authors of the study, who spent years rummaging through the area for squirrel burrows. 'It's a natural cryobank.'"
Democrats

Protect IP Act May Be Amended 179

Posted by samzenpus from the making-changes dept.
angry tapir writes "The controversial U.S. copyright enforcement bill called The Protect IP Act may be amended on the Senate floor later this month in response to ongoing concerns about its provisions affecting Internet service providers and the domain-name system, according to the bill's chief sponsor, Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat."
Communications

More Details On Drug Cartel's Clandestine Communications Network 84

Posted by timothy from the odd-shaped-fruits-of-the-drug-war dept.
K7DAN writes "The AP reports that Mexico's drug cartels have built their own sophisticated two-way radio communications system using computer-controlled linked and local repeaters on mountain tops, walkie-talkies, mobile transceivers and and base stations. The solar powered system covers vast areas of Mexico that are unserved by cellular phone network and has the advantage of being more difficult to trace." This article adds much more substance about the technology than was included in the report several weeks ago of the seizure of thousands of this network's components; from the description in this article, the earlier headline overstated the case by saying that the network had therefore been "shut down."
Networking

Verizon Announces Pay-Per-Use 'Turbo Boost' For Smartphones 129

Posted by timothy from the insert-coin-insert-coin-insert-coin dept.
renek writes "In one of the most brazen attacks on net neutrality to date, Verizon has announced it will offer a so called 'Turbo Boost' for smart phones that run on its wireless network. 'Verizon will publish an API that could allow consumers to 'turbocharge' the network bandwidth their smartphone apps use for a small fee, executives said Tuesday. Verizon anticipates that a customer running an app on a smartphone will have the option to dynamically snatch more bandwidth for that app, if network congestion slows it down, said Hugh Fletcher, associate director for technology in Verizon's Product Development and Technology team. The app, however, must be running what Verizon referred to as the network optimization API it is currently developing, and hopes to publish by the third quarter of 2012.'"

Comment Re:Sad, actually (Score 5, Insightful) 285

by TheUnFounded (#33615230) Attached to: James Cameron Commissions Submarine To Visit Challenger Deep
On the other hand, it got them there, but didn't do a whole lot of good. From Wikipedia:

"The descent took almost five hours and the two men spent barely twenty minutes on the ocean floor before undertaking the three-hour-and-fifteen-minute ascent. Their early departure from the ocean floor was due to their concern over a crack in the window caused by the intense pressure of their descent, and also because their landing on the sea bed had stirred up a cloud of silt which reduced visibility to zero and showed no sign of settling." So hopefully the new technology will give us a longer, more interesting time at the bottom...

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