[IP] more on Blackout hits major Web sites|ZDNet Must-Read News Alerts

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Jim Balter <jim@balter.name>
Date: June 17, 2004 3:43:08 AM EDT
To: dave@farber.net, Ip <ip@v2.listbox.com>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Blackout hits major Web sites|ZDNet Must-Read 
News Alerts

On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 08:43:55 -0400
 David Farber <dave@farber.net> wrote:
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: "Patrick W.Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net>
> Date: June 16, 2004 1:38:20 AM EDT
> To: dave@farber.net
> Cc: "Patrick W.Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net>
> Subject: Re: [IP] Blackout hits major Web sites|ZDNet Must-Read News 
> Alerts
>
> DISCLAIMER: I work for Akamai Technologies.
>
> Which is also why I know Mr. Song is showing himself to be an idiot, 
> making sweeping accusations on assumptions which do not correlate to 
> reality.
>
> --
> TTFN,
> patrick
>
>
> On Jun 15, 2004, at 4:53 PM, David Farber wrote:
>
> > Blackout hits major Web sites
> >
> > Google, Microsoft.com and others go dark after an apparent outage of
> > Akamai's domain name server system. Yahoo Mail still patchy.
> >
> > http://ct.com.com/click?q=c8-2lPnQWOJdK75YyzznoSPFel9u29R
>
> This is brilliant:
>
> <quote>
> "It was definitely some sort of Akamai issue," Song said in an 
> interview. "Their name service for all these major sites stopped 
> working. You couldn't reach these sites, even though the sites were 
> up. You just couldn't get to them because the name resolution wasn't 
> working."
>
> Furthermore, Song noticed that Web-wide traffic during the outage 
> actually declined, making it unlikely that Google and the other sites 
> were the victims of a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which 
> thousands of unknowing PC "slaves" would have flooded their servers 
> with useless data or requests for data.
> </quote>
>
> Did Mr. Song consider the possibility that the DoS attack was pointed 
> at the name servers?  Especially since both Keynote and Akamai mention 
> that there was an attack on Akamai's name service.  And if so, 
> wouldn't that have the effect of lowering "Web-wide traffic"?  He 
> himself admits that users cannot get to web sites if the name 
> resolution is not working.

Mr. Gilmore seems to affirm Mr. Song's position -- that it
was "some sort of Akamai issue", specifically "name service",
i.e., an attack on Akamai's name servers, rather than an attack
on "four sites that happened to be Akamai customers", as stated
by Akamai's spokesman Jeff Young.  Contrary to Mr. Gilmore's
statement, Akamai did not "mention that there was an attack on
Akamai's name service" -- not in the quoted article.  Rather,
"Akamai said the strike against those customers in turn caused
a failure of its own domain name server (DNS) system".
Rather than "both Keynote and Akamai" mentioning anything,
the article says "Other parties may not agree with that assessment."
The disagreement appears to be whether customers were struck causing
Akamai's DNS to go down (the position of Akamai's spokesman),
or Akamai's DNS was struck, causing customers to be unreachable
(the position of Keynote, Mr. Song, and apparently Mr. Gilmore).

I think Patrick Gilmore should be a bit more cautious in using
terms like "idiot" and "this is brilliant", which play into
a widely held perception of Akamai as "arrogant".

(My disclaimer -- I'm a former employee of Sandpiper/Digital 
Island/Exodus/Cable&Wireless, a competitor and co-litigant of
Akamai, and had plenty of occasion to form such a perception.)

> Not sure I would want to purchase products from a security company 
> whose "security architect" does not understand the interaction between 
> DNS and HTTP....

There's no evidence that he does not understand that.  The decline
in traffic suggests that the attack was against Akamai's name servers,
not against "four sites", a point on which Mr. Song and Mr. Gilmore
appear to agree.

-- Jim Balter

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