CCBill Isn't Making Me Happy

[JustMe]

Greetings:

Day #2 and they're STILL up/down/slow. Now I understand that they said that they WERE under a DDOS yesterday, but how long is it going to take for them to admit that they're STILL under a DDOS.

[basschick]

when gfy and awi were under serious ddos attack, it took several days to get it sorted out. same with netpond, i believe.

[Chilihost]

yes, I noticed that they were still having issues too

cheers,
Luke

[Lloyd_CCBill]

Hey Guys,

Regrettably CCBill was the victim of a DDOS attack at approximately 6:45 am Arizona time. Our network engineers were contacted immediately and were able to resolve the problem and our systems have been operating at 100% since the resolution. If you are still experiencing some slow response times or timeouts from the CCBill systems please do not hesitate to contact either myself directly or our Client Support staff via email, clientsupport@ccbill.com, or toll free 800.510.2859.

In the aftermath of what transpired yesterday some of our clients have expressed a concern with slow response times and we have been dealing with these on an individual basis. Usually the problem can be found and solved through obtaining trace route information and replying to the proper host or router. If you do have any concerns I will be at the CCBill office for the next three hours to field any questions you may have personally.

[sockstars]

what is a ddos attack ?

[JustBryce]

distributed denial of service

[Slade]

distributed denial of service

and all this time I thought it meant that old MS product..Double Dos! :goofy:

[gaybucks_chip]

To be fair to ccbill, denial-of-service attacks, if well planned by the attackers, can be extremely difficult to defend.

What you have is tens of thousands of compromised machines, all sending requests at the same time, overloading the circuits and blocking or limiting access to legitimate traffic. This is similar to what MensNiche.com experienced some weeks ago.

It's not as simple as blocking the IPs from which the attacks are coming from, because there's not common element to them. And many of the more sophisticated attacks are capable of "learning" and shifting their attack methods as network engineers block the traffic.

So, in my book, even though it cost us (as a ccbill-serviced membership site) money to have ccbill inaccessible, I still applaud CCBill's quick response in addressing the problem and doing their best to get it under control as quickly as possible.

[basschick]

i completely agree

To be fair to ccbill, denial-of-service attacks, if well planned by the attackers, can be extremely difficult to defend.

What you have is tens of thousands of compromised machines, all sending requests at the same time, overloading the circuits and blocking or limiting access to legitimate traffic. This is similar to what MensNiche.com experienced some weeks ago.

It's not as simple as blocking the IPs from which the attacks are coming from, because there's not common element to them. And many of the more sophisticated attacks are capable of "learning" and shifting their attack methods as network engineers block the traffic.

So, in my book, even though it cost us (as a ccbill-serviced membership site) money to have ccbill inaccessible, I still applaud CCBill's quick response in addressing the problem and doing their best to get it under control as quickly as possible.

[JustBryce]

Yes, there is very little you can do if nothing to defend yourself against a ddos attack. They can take down sites as large as google, microsoft, and ebay and have in the past.

As paysite webmasters, you can help lessen the impact of a ddos on your biller though by cascading. At the time of the ddos attack, ccbill was set as the primary biller in our cascade (we use NATS currently). As the ddos attack occured, I was able to see it in our signup emails. There was a shift as the joins started coming in through epoch instead. This signaled the problem early on to us and our software was handling the problem for us. I went ahead though and in just a few seconds clicked a few times in our paysite admin and put Epoch at the top of the cascade. It was literally as simple as clicking a down arrow next to the ccbill entry to move it down.

Interestingly, I was also able to detect in our stats remote yesterday the ddos attack. Our ccbill affiliate master account hurt badly yesterday, but those sites that had cascading were all unaffected. A couple of the sites use NATS and one was using MPA3. There were a couple that seem to have their own custom affiliate backend, but all seemed to have average sales without the dip of those that were using the ccbill affiliate program.

Anyway, just an observation. You can help mitigate biller downtime by being sure to have a backup processor or two. This could just as easily have happened to Epoch, Verotel, or whomever. As long as you aren't the direct recipient of the attack, this is one thing you can do to help lessen the impact... plus you'll pick up an extra 10 - 15% in sales by making cascading a part of your business even on normal days

[Lee]

The good thing is they are keeping their clients informed of the situation unlike some other processors did in the past.

Speaking of which, that just gave me an idea for a new thread LOL

Regards,

Lee

[Fetishlady]

i think not all the webmasters or clients were informed cause some webmasters didn't know they were down only after they checked them..did they realize it was down.