20/03/2018: Major Upstream Network Outage and DOS attack

From approxiamtely 14:45, as well as a major upstream network outage, our platform was subjected to a sustained Denial of Service (“DOS”) attack on our Remote Desktop (“RDP”) service, as were many like it, whereby tens of thousands of bogus RDP connection attempts were made from many different locations across the globe.  These issues might have been connected.  Precisely none of these attempts succeeded but the platform performance was frequently limited and sometimes overwhelmed by the effort of fending off the attack.

We have blocked many culprit IP addresses and, so far today, the attack is much reduced and the platform is coping easily.  However, we can’t guarantee that the attack won’t increase until the perpetrators realise that they won’t succeed with our platform and decide to move on to find less-well defended networks.

Unfortunately there is little we can do to stop such DOS attacks while we keep our RDP service easily accessible for you – we can only defend against them.  Consider it similar to spam emails:

-          Raise the defences too high and many or all genuine connections will be blocked;

-          Keep them low enough to allow easy access for genuine connections and some bogus connection attempts must be dealt with.

We continue to explore current and new technologies to maintain and improve the services we provide and will keep you posted on our plans and developments.

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