myComitatus Portal Service Interuption

Posted by Jeramie on 15 September 2009 | 0 Comments

Tags: Piryx, myComitatus, downtime

By now some of you may have noticed the downtime that's been occurring since Friday September 11th, 2009. Yesterday, at 3:12 pm CST, Piryx noticed a bandwidth spike on the downstream connections to Piryx.com server at the Piryx Datacenter. This was the result of high packet rate attacks mixed with the traditional bandwidth based DOS (Denial of Service) attacks targeted at a specific Piryx client.

At 3:25pm CST we took the first step to mitigate these attacks by filtering them on all our boarder routers in Austin and Dallas. During which time, we were hit larger attacks that began to grow in size.
Throughout the evening the Piryx crew was hard at work trying to mitigate these attacks, and at 1:45am CST on September 12th, we successfully integrated a block that filtered out most of the malicious traffic and brought our systems back online.

“ Our security and technology team worked tirelessly during the traffic spike and the subsequent attack. After assessing the situation and exploring a number of options, additional security filters were implemented to block the malicious traffic. Our most immediate concern was that the proper measures be taken to ensure that the system did not suffer further outages after coming back online,” said Brian Upton, Piryx CTO.

“None of our systems were compromised in the attack because they were centered on disabling access to our services, basically blocking people from making payments to our users through our social commerce platform. We have hired external security consultants to help protect our customers,” said Tom Serres, Piryx CEO.

Comitatus and Piryx are working to keep any potential downtime to a minimum. We appreciate your patience and thank you for your understanding and support.
We are prepared to work with our partners to keep any potential downtime to a minimum. We appreciate your patience and thank you for your understanding and support. This does not necessarily mean that we are out of the woods yet, but you should be back online.
Piryx is a non-partisan software start-up based out of Austin, TX serving Non-Profits, Political Organizations, and Small Businesses; providing users with advanced Social Commerce technology to use in branded commerce activity. Priyx serves organizations of all shapes and sizes all over the US in a private beta environment. Not only did this attack affect you, but it affected all of our users – and does appear to be politically motivated. Please note that Piryx does not endorse or serve any specific political affiliation – we are simply a social commerce provider.