By Jordan Feigenbaum, Product Manager, Financial Markets Network, IPC
Elvis Costello said it best: accidents will happen. Last time, I highlighted some inadvertent incidents which impacted the internet and public cloud providers. These things have happened before, and they will happen again.
Bad actors.
This time around, I’m going to talk about the more nefarious side of unavailability, the things that can happen due to security vulnerabilities.
The most well-known and -publicized incident happened in 2016, when DNS provider Dyn was targeted by hackers with multiple Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks using the Mirai botnet, which caused major swaths of the internet to be unavailable in the US and Europe for an entire business day (1).
However, purposeful and harmful outages, of scales both large and small, are occurring at an ever-increasing rate.
- A hacker used the same Mirai botnet in November 2016 that crippled internet connectivity across the nation of Liberia and in parts of Germany (2).
- Fiber cuts by vandals took down internet access for some New York City residents who used Spectrum, two separate times: June 2017 (3) and November 2017 (4).
- In April 2018, an unknown party cut the lone subsea cable that connects the African nation of Mauritania to the internet, causing a total internet outage for 48 hours, followed by an extended restoration period (5).
Perhaps the most alarming thing I’ve read on this topic involves the new trend of bad actors going after infrastructure: power plants, shipping terminals and so on. It appears they are taking advantage of outdated infrastructure with the intention to cause legitimate public safety issues (6).
How can I continue to get access to my public cloud power during an internet outage?
Of course, the internet isn’t as unstable as I’ve projected here. These are isolated incidents, but their frequency and scope are growing, and it has to be of legitimate concern to anyone who is putting business critical applications and data onto public cloud servers. If your internet connection goes down and there is a trading emergency, how can you get to your public cloud environment to handle the issue?
And even when your internet connection is available, there are myriad other issues that can cause pain points. The internet has no performance guarantees, there are no SLA’s around uptime or latency. Further, there’s no single vendor for you to work with to isolate and troubleshoot your connectivity issues. IPC brings all of these to the table, with industry-leading SLA’s and a world-class, 24x7x365 help desk for you to work with.
IPC’s Connexus ecosystem is uniquely positioned to get you access to the public cloud, by using our private cloud to get there. In fact, you can get to over 550 Cloud Service Providers and public clouds over your one secure connection to IPC.
The Connexus suite is a fully managed Network as a Service (NaaS) with Points of Presence in over 130 locations globally. Using our world-class MPLS backbone, IPC can establish private network capabilities into your locations, wherever they might be located around the world, and use those connections to get you to AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or any of the other public cloud providers we have access to.
Connexus Extranet, IPC’s Layer 3 extranet solution has been built to the specifications of capital markets participants, as have all of IPC’s industry-leading solutions. Let IPC use our expertise in network solutions to help get you to your mission critical public cloud services.
Links:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Dyn_cyberattack
- https://www.pcmag.com/news/365933/2-years-for-hacker-who-crippled-liberias-internet-with-mira
- https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/NYC-60000-Spectrum-Customers-Queens-Lose-Cable-Internet-After-Vandals-Cut-Cord-430959283.html
- https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Vandals-Cause-Thanksgiving-Morning-Outage-for-Spectrum-Customers-in-Brooklyn-Queens-459534013.html
- https://www.businessinsider.com/undersea-international-internet-cables-cut-in-africa-2018-4
- https://www.businessinsider.com/can-hackers-take-entire-countries-offline-2018-12
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