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Q3 2021 DDoS attacks and BGP incidents

Reading time7 min
Views3.5K

The third quarter of 2021 brought a massive upheaval in the scale and intensity of DDoS attacks worldwide.

It all led to September when together with Yandex, we uncovered one of the most devastating botnets since the Mirai and named it Meris, as it was held accountable for a series of attacks with a very high RPS rate. And as those attacks were aimed all over the world, our quarterly statistics also changed.

This quarter, we've also prepared for your consideration a slice of statistics on the application layer (L7) DDoS attacks. Without further ado, let us elaborate on the details of DDoS attacks statistics and BGP incidents for Q3, 2021.

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Спасти производство во время пандемии: личный опыт

Reading time6 min
Views122
Вызванный пандемией экономический кризис ударил по экономикам всего мира двумя путями: снижение и частичная остановка экономической активности из-за карантинных мер в разных странах, и вызванными локдаунами нарушениями цепочек производства и поставок. Одно из достижений, которым гордилась современная экономика — это тонко настроенное глобальное разделение труда, при котором логистические цепочки растянуты по всей планете, и поставки по ним ходят «встык», без задержек — и, как следствие того, без запаса.



В результате этого, выход из карантинного состояния обернулся для многих секторов экономики, своего рода, афтершоком. После периода просевшего спроса и нарушенных цепочек производства-поставки, они столкнулись с эффектом отложенного спроса — и даже просто возвращение к докризисному уровню оказалось шоковым для выходящих из экономической гибернации бизнесов. Как результат — возникли перегрев рынка и инфляция в отдельных сферах экономики. Многие потребители в тех или иных сферах ощутили на себе, как продукты и услуги, невостребованные, когда им было не до них в разгар локдаунов и связанных с ними проблем, оказались в дефиците или подорожали после ослабления карантинных мер.

В этой ситуации выиграли те бизнесы, которые были готовы к такому повороту событий. Разумеется, подготовиться к замедлению экономической активности заранее никто не мог, поскольку предсказать серьёзность мер в ответ на пандемию до их принятия во многих случаях до последнего момента не могли даже правительства разных стран, то предугадать их экономические последствия на ход-два вперёд было вполне возможно.
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Who controls App Store: Martians or AI? Closed session of Russia's Federation Council and Apple leaked online

Reading time2 min
Views3.3K


Video recording of a closed session of the upper house of Russia's parliament was leaked online by Telegram channel A000MP97. In the video, Andrei Klimov, head of the Ad Hoc Sovereignty and Preventing Interference in the Domestic Affairs Commission, demands Apple to disclose who controls the App Store: people from Mars or artificial intelligence?

On September 16th, a closed session of the Commission took place, and representatives of Apple and Google were among those who were invited. The session discussed ways to protect sovereignty of the country, in particular, the fact that the Navalny app was still available in Apple App Store and Google Play. The services were accused of being complicit with organisations deemed extremist and banned in Russia as well as interference with Russian elections.
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Mēris botnet, climbing to the record

Reading time7 min
Views16K

Introduction

For the last five years, there have virtually been almost no global-scale application-layer attacks.

During this period, the industry has learned how to cope with the high bandwidth network layer attacks, including amplification-based ones. It does not mean that botnets are now harmless.

End of June 2021, Qrator Labs started to see signs of a new assaulting force on the Internet – a botnet of a new kind. That is a joint research we conducted together with Yandex to elaborate on the specifics of the DDoS attacks enabler emerging in almost real-time.

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In-Memory Showdown: Redis vs. Tarantool

Reading time13 min
Views5.9K
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In this article, I am going to look at Redis versus Tarantool. At a first glance, they are quite alike — in-memory, NoSQL, key value. But we are going to look deeper. My goal is to find meaningful similarities and differences, I am not going to claim that one is better than the other.

There are three main parts to my story:

  • We’ll find out what is an in-memory database, or IMDB. When and how are they better than disk solutions?
  • Then, we’ll consider their architecture. What about their efficiency, reliability, and scaling?
  • Then, we’ll delve into technical details. Data types, iterators, indexes, transactions, programming languages, replication, and connectors.

Feel free to scroll down to the most interesting part or even the summary comparison table at the very bottom and the article.
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System-on-Chip bus: AXI4 simplified and explained

Reading time20 min
Views37K

Protocol AXI4 was developed for High-bandwidth and low latency applications. It is designed to allow communication between master and slave devices. Master is typically a DMA or CPU and slaves are DRAM controllers, or other specific protocol controllers: UART, SPI, and others. Sometimes one component can implement multiple instances of this protocol. Usually, a prefix is used to differentiate between multiple AXI4 interfaces.

For example, Ethernet MAC can integrate DMA and slave interface used to command MAC. MAC can accept commands on the slave interface that contain data about the location of the next ethernet packet and MAC can start fetching this packet using the separate master interface instance.

This article was motivated by common design mistakes AXI4 designers make when they are designing their Digital IP. (Looking at you Xilinx)

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Building an Arduino based RFID Emulator

Reading time7 min
Views16K

This project is aimed at creating an experimental device for emulating RFID labels of three widely available components. I simplified the explanation of the process so that it could be easily replicated. I also developed some helpful ideas along the way, including writing a special program for converting a serial number into the transmitted data, which will definitely prove useful.

Mode on: Comparing the two best colorization AI's

Reading time11 min
Views4K

This article continues a series of notes about colorization. During today's experiment, we’ll be comparing a recent neural network with the good old Deoldify to gauge the rate at which the future is approaching.

This is a practical project, so we won’t pay extra attention to the underlying philosophy of the Transformer architecture. Besides, any attempt to explain the principles of its operation to a wide public in hand waving terms would become misguiding.

A lecturer: Mr. Petrov! How does a transformer work?
Petrov with a bass voice: Hum-m-m-m.


Google Colorizing Transformer vs Deoldify

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An Unexpected Article About Our Unicorn: Who Is the PVS-Studio Mascot?

Reading time5 min
Views2K

PVS-Studio has a mascot that became inseparable from the brand - a unicorn. Lately we've been getting many questions about our magic steed: why the unicorn, why has he changed so much, does he have hooves, how come he doesn't wear pants, and how do we draw him. The answers are finally here, in this very article.

Attention: there will be a lot of pictures. And I mean A LOT.

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Overview of Morris's counters

Reading time7 min
Views1.4K

On implementing streaming algorithms, counting of events often occurs, where an event means something like a packet arrival or a connection establishment. Since the number of events is large, the available memory can become a bottleneck: an ordinary n-bit counter allows to take into account no more than 2^n - 1events.
One way to handle a larger range of values using the same amount of memory would be approximate counting. This article provides an overview of the well-known Morris algorithm and some generalizations of it.

Another way to reduce the number of bits required for counting mass events is to use decay. We discuss such an approach here [3], and we are going to publish another blog post on this particular topic shortly.

In the beginning of this article, we analyse one straightforward probabilistic calculation algorithm and highlight its shortcomings (Section 2). Then (Section 3), we describe the algorithm proposed by Robert Morris in 1978 and indicate its most essential properties and advantages. For most non-trivial formulas and statements, the text contains our proofs, the demanding reader can find them in the inserts. In the following three sections, we outline valuable extensions of the classic algorithm: you can learn what Morris's counters and exponential decay have in common, how to improve the accuracy by sacrificing the maximum value, and how to handle weighted events efficiently.

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Q1 2021 DDoS attacks and BGP incidents

Reading time6 min
Views1.7K

The year 2021 started on such a high note for Qrator Labs: on January 19, our company celebrated its 10th anniversary. Shortly after, in February, our network mitigated quite an impressive 750 Gbps DDoS attack based on old and well known DNS amplification. Furthermore, there is a constant flow of BGP incidents; some are becoming global routing anomalies. We started reporting in our newly made Twitter account for Qrator.Radar.

Nevertheless, with the first quarter of the year being over, we can take a closer look at DDoS attacks statistics and BGP incidents for January - March 2021.

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Qrator Labs' Value Partnership Programs

Reading time3 min
Views1K

Why is it valuable to get into the Qrator Labs partnership program?

In Qrator Labs, we firmly believe that working together brings a better result. Which is the reason why, for years, we were trying to find meaningful partnerships with all kinds of companies. They either seek to provide their existing customers with the top-notch DDoS mitigation technology developed at Qrator Labs with many additional ecosystem solutions or want to succeed the other way around. By getting their product available for Qrator Labs' customers by integrating into the Qrator anycast filtering network.

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11 Kubernetes implementation mistakes – and how to avoid them

Reading time13 min
Views4.6K

I manage a team that designs and introduces in-house Kubernetes aaS at Mail.ru Cloud Solutions. And we often see a lack of understanding as to this technology, so I’d like to talk about common strategic mistakes at Kubernetes implementation in major projects.

Most of the problems arise because the technology is quite sophisticated. There are unobvious implementation and operation challenges, as well as poorly used advantages, all of those resulting in money loss. Another issue is the global lack of knowledge and experience with Kubernetes. Learning its use by the book can be tricky, and hiring qualified staff can be challenging. All the hype complicates Kubernetes-related decision making. Curiously enough, Kubernetes is often implemented rather formally – just for it to be there and make their lives better in some way.

Hopefully, this post will help you to make a decision you will feel proud of later (and won’t regret or feel like building a time machine to undo it).
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Multiple violations of policies in RMS open letter

Reading time7 min
Views3.9K

Author: Chris Punches (@cmpunches, Silo group). License: "Please feel free to share unmodified".

The following text is an unmodified copy of now removed issue #2250 on rms-open-letter.github.io repository. The text claims multiple violations of different policies, codes of conduct and other documents in creation, content and support of the "Open letter to remove Richard M. Stallman from all leadership positions". The issue has not been addressed.

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2020 Network Security and Availability Report

Reading time9 min
Views1K

By the beginning of 2021, Qrator Labs filtering network expands to 14 scrubbing centers and a total of 3 Tbps filtering bandwidth capacity, with the San Paolo scrubbing facility fully operational in early 2021;

New partner services fully integrated into Qrator Labs infrastructure and customer dashboard throughout 2020: SolidWall WAF and RuGeeks CDN;

Upgraded filtering logic allows Qrator Labs to serve even bigger infrastructures with full-scale cybersecurity protection and DDoS attacks mitigation;

The newest AMD processors are now widely used by Qrator Labs in packet processing.

DDoS attacks were on the rise during 2020, with the most relentless attacks described as short and overwhelmingly intensive.

However, BGP incidents were an area where it was evident that some change was and still is needed, as there was a significant amount of devastating hijacks and route leaks.

In 2020, we began providing our services in Singapore under a new partnership and opened a new scrubbing center in Dubai, where our fully functioning branch is staffed by the best professionals to serve local customers.

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OOX 2.0: Out of order execution made easy

Reading time13 min
Views2.3K

As Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) is being refreshed using new C++ standard, deprecating tbb::task interface, the need for high-level tasking interface becomes more obvious. In this article, I’m proposing yet another way of defining what a high-level parallel task programming model can look like in modern C++. I created it in 2014 and it was my last contribution to TBB project as its core developer after 9 wonderful years of working there. However, this proposal has not been used in production yet, so a new discussion might help it to be adopted.

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NTFS Reparse Points

Reading time8 min
Views2.4K
Hi, Habr. Here I have prepared for you a small guide about NTFS Reparse points (hereinafter RP). This article is for those who are just starting to dive into the Windows kernel drivers development. In the beginning, I will explain the theory with examples, then I will give an interesting task to solve.


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