Recent Service Outages on luke.tlanet.co.uk

2014-09-04

Recently we have suffered several outages on the luke.tlanet.co.uk server due to DDoS attacks on a specific domain on the server. These attacks are when webservers at several locations flood one server with hundreds of connections. These connections overload the server and prevent the server from being able to process the requests for information. This includes other websites on that server and also email services etc.

We use Hyperspin as our 3rd party monitoring service and since the 23rd of August it has reported 12 server outages which were caused by these attacks. We normally provide a service where the uptime is around 99.98%.

Here are some sample IP Addresses that have been banned recently.

77.247.181.165 with 305 connections
195.154.8.224 with 118 connections
31.31.76.64 with 171 connections
96.47.226.20 with 226 connections
18.238.2.85 with 138 connections
178.175.139.140 with 134 connections
82.69.29.71 with 131 connections
95.130.9.190 with 113 connections
46.182.106.190 with 108 connections

Unfortunately blocking these IP Addresses does not prevent the attack from beginning again as the instigators just use different IP Addresses.

We have had no choice but to suspend the hosting account that was being attacked in order to prevent the server from being overloaded and customers websites and email from being unavailable.

We are sorry for the recent server outages and we're hopeful that we've now dealt with the problem.

UPDATE: This attack is now in the hands of the National Crime Agencies National Cyber Crime Unit

Andy Roberts
TLA Hosting