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Website Outage Report (Jun 16 & 17)

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The goal of this blog post is to provide background information to those clients who experienced website outages on Monday and Tuesday this week. The following illustration demonstrates certain characteristics of any disaster timeline:dr-timeline.png

Figure 1. Typical disaster timeline

In our case, Time of Disaster happened on Monday (6/17/2009) around 11AM EST when two out of  five OGO Sense servers suffered a DOS Attack . You might have heard that in the past Yahoo, Amazon and some popular services have suffered from these type of malicious attacks.

Related to our Last Restore Point, OGO Sense makes daily backups of website databases and weekly backup of all files. However, in this case, we did not need to use any of our site backups as official website data has been preserved. So Lost Data has been very minimal to none.

Service Downtime is the amount of the time from the Time of Disaster to the Service Restored point of time. In some cases, this downtime lasted as long as 24 to 28 hours for websites while email service continued to work correctly for most clients at all times.

Many clients have asked us why Service Downtime has taken so long and here are 3 primary reasons:

1. Many websites had their disaster recovery location on another server that also got attacked a couple of hours later. This alternative (disaster recovery) location is a place where sites are recreated if their primary location fails.

2. OGO Sense did not have access or login information for many domain registrars or DNS Zones so it had to contact clients related to switching of nameservers or IP addresses.

3. The number of websites affected has been considerable which resulted in slow creation of 3rd party hosting accounts. Additionally, with limited access to those hosting accounts and different server configuration, additional issues have appeared and slowed down our team.


The Service Restored point of time took place as we moved some sites to different hosting accounts and set up new firewall rules to defend from the outside attacks on our servers.

While OGO Sense did not initiate these issues, we are truly sorry for the inconvenience caused and we'll credit all affected clients with one free month of maintenance. Additionally, we are looking to put additional measures in place to prevent similar attacks from hackers and your or our own competitors.

If you have any questions or comments about this network outage, please do not hesitate to contact us .

 

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NORTH AMERICA:
OGO Sense
PO BOX 10225
Portland, Maine 04104
United States
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US Phone: +1 (617) 418-4646
UK Phone: + 44 20 7617 7508
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Skype: ogosense
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OGO Sense
Brace Mazara. 47
78000 Banja Luka, RS
Bosnia and Herzegovina