TODAY, the attackers hopped IP's to our new IP immediately. So they appear to be learning. But then again, so are we.

Gigenet's anti-DDoS service has helped us a ton here and is now serving as our front door IP to block the synflood. They've been really responsive.

Most people using low TTLs probably don't know what they're doing, and if you're a big ISP having to constantly make recursive queries hurts page load times for your customers, who'll blame you.

Surprising that it works so well for you.

As you’re no doubt aware, Posterous has had a rocky six days.

On Wednesday and Friday, our servers were hit by massive Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. We responded quickly and got back online within an hour, but it didn’t matter; the site went down and our users couldn’t post.

On Friday night, our team worked around the clock to move to new data centers, better capable of handling the onslaught. It wasn’t easy. Throughout the weekend we were fixing issues, optimizing the site, some things going smoothly, others less so.

Just at the moments we thought the worst was behind us, we’d run up against another challenge. It tested not only our technical abilities, but our stamina, patience, and we lost more than a few hairs in the process.

I’m happy to report Posterous is at 100% and better than ever. Switching to a new data center will help us avoid the type of attacks we saw last week, and the new, bigger, beefier servers will speed up the site and increase capacity. We were hit pretty hard, but we’ve come out stronger in the end.

While we were certainly frustrated, we know that no one was more frustrated than you. Your website was down, and I humbly apologize for that. Know that throughout these six days, restoring your site and your trust has been our number one priority.

At the same time, I have never been prouder of the Posterous team. Garry led the team in the server migration, Vince worked like a mad man until he passed out on his desk, and Jackson helped the community understand the impacts of some pretty technical issues. This week has been all hands on deck, and we had some pretty great hands.

We have great plans for the future of Posterous. Our team is stronger than ever, and we are laser focused on developing better ways for you to share your content online. Thank you for believing in us, thank you for trusting us, and thank you for sticking with us through the past six days.

--Sachin Agarwal Cofounder and CEO, Posterous

The new events, if not handled quickly, could create doubt in customer minds and the team, as the optimistic outlook may not hold. I hope they beat this soon.

This isn't like the ones who DDOS'ed MS out of their hatred for it or the ones who blackmailed & DDOS'ed a gambling website when they refused to pay up.

That said, if it's like most other DDOS attacks I've seen reported, the target is probably a user of the service with Posterous merely being unlucky enough to host a particular site someone doesn't like. I vaguely recall another platform got DDOSed recently due to some Israel vs Iran type cyberwar.

Weebly said (I think in their YC Founders at Work interview) that they get multiple DDoSes a day, aimed not at them but at sites they host. Now they have good enough systems in place to deal with it that they said they often just don't notice.

I guess when you host enough people's content, it's only a matter of time before someone wants to DoS something you're hosting.

It's not inconceivable, but it seems like a huge leap.

http://www.blogherald.com/2010/06/24/posterous-slanders-tumb...

Maybe there's financial incentives?

I don't see where they stated it was a DDOS attack. Packet loss can occur due to a large number of different issues.

EDIT: They just clarified with the following: The DDoS attackers have returned and evolved their attack around our countermeasures. We expect to be back online ASAP w/ @gigenet antiddos

Gige's DDOS protection is basically a hosted redirect and filtering system that "leverage[s] the cost of DDoS mitigation amongst a large group of businesses, giving you access to the infrastructure that would normally be out of reach financially." http://www.gigenet.com/ddos-protection.html

But if Posterous is hosted on the Rackspace cloud, why isn't there a mechanism to do this through their existing host? After all, Rackspace has an equivalent service (maybe rebranded?) that would seem to offer protection without needing to go to a 3rd party vendor. http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/services/security/d...

So it's interesting that Posterous needed to go around Rackspace to get a solution.

Gigenet / Black Lotus / Prolexic comes in and says -- we have excess bandwidth, we'll take care of it. Then they proxy clean traffic to you. Unfortunately as we are learning, it's also very expensive.

That was classless.

Most of their competitors are in the same situation they are in.

Being the first one to torpedo the other ship and not expecting someone to get upset or God forbid do something awful in return is naive.

I think there is a difference in poaching your competitor's customers and claiming they are "no good".

We've opted to use Gigenet, and they're holding the line right now quite well.

I hope Posterous does a write-up about this on Axon Flux when this is all over. Poor fellars.