IT Infrastructure *

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.

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.

This article continues the series of articles on load tests. Today we will analyze the testing methodology and answer the question: "How many IP cameras can be connected to a WebRTC server?"

Do you remember how just a few years ago it was a disaster to lose a camera at the end of a vacation? All memorable pictures and videos then disappeared along with the lost device. Probably, this fact prompted the great minds to invent cloud storage, so that the safety of records no longer depends on the presence of the devices on which these records are made.

We continue to review variants of load tests. In this article we will go over the testing methodology and conduct a load test that we will use to try and determine the number of users that could watch and stream at the same time, meaning the users will simultaneously publish and view the streams.

This article is a continuation of our series of write-ups about load tests for our server. We have already discussed how to compile metrics and how to use them to choose the equipment, and we also provided an overview of various load testing methods. Today we shall look at how the server handles stream mixing.

In the previous article we went over a load test whose data could be used to choose a load-appropriate server. In the course of the testing, we would publish a stream on one WCS, and we would pick up that stream several times using a second WCS. The acquired results could be used as a basis for decisions on server operability.

Some would (justly) have concerns regarding the possible biases in such a test — after all, one of our servers was used to test another one of our servers. Could it be that we were using a specially optimized code that skewed the results in our favor?

If you use Zabbix to monitor your infrastructure objects but have not previously thought about collecting and storing logs from these objects then this article is for you.

In any project, a great deal of importance is placed on the selection of server hardware and WebRTC streaming is no exception. One of the key principles of such a selection is balance – the hardware should be powerful enough to handle the streams with no drops in quality, but not too powerful so as to waste resources. So, how does one choose the right server?

Monitoring systems are a vital tool for any system administrator, because they can be used to extract specific information from services, such that:

This article is aimed to describe FreeBSD OS as a platform to launch cloud guest OSes with simple API capabilities, using MyBee and DevOPS I really like!

Network architecture at hyperscalers is a subject to constant innovation and is ever evolving to meet the demand. Network operators are constantly experimenting with solutions and finding new ways to keep it reliable and cost effective. Hyperscalers are periodically publishing their findings and innovations in a variety of scientific and technical groups.

The purpose of this article is to summarize the information about how hyperscalers design and manage networks. The goal here is to help connecting the dots, dissect and digest the data from a variety of sources including my personal experience working with hyperscalers.

DISCLAIMER: All information in this article is acquired from public resources. This article contains my own opinion which might not match and does not represent the opinion of my employer.

Microservices Architecture is a well-known pattern for building a complex system that consists of loosely coupled modules. It provides better scalability, and it is easier to develop a system in multiple teams so that they don’t interfere with each other too much. However, it is important to choose the right way of communication between the services. Otherwise, this kind of architecture can do more harm than good.

The PVS-Studio website turns 15 this year. This is quite significant for any internet resource. Back then, when our website was born, Russia announced 2006 as a year of humanities. That same year, in June, Denis Kryuchkov established a new platform, "Habrhabr" (now known as Habr). In November, Microsoft officially completed OS Windows Vista. That same month we registered the viva64.com domain.

We celebrated our domain's 10th anniversary with the website's redesign. After that, we would only change the resource capacity and features, but we'd never touch the design in any way. During this time, the number of articles grew so much that we needed to add tags to facilitate navigation. Right now we are also working on our YouTube channel. This means, you will see more and more new videos on our website as well. We keep adding new web pages at a tremendous rate, while the website's usability stays the same.

Time has come for big changes!

I have already written about AIOps and machine learning methods in working with IT incidents, about hybrid umbrella monitoring and various approaches to service management. Now I would like to share a very specific algorithm, how one can quickly get information about functioning conditions of business applications using synthetic monitoring and how to build, on this basis, the health metric of business services at no special cost. The story is based on a real case of implementing the algorithm into the IT system of one of the airlines.

Currently there are many APM systems, such as Appdynamics, Dynatrace, and others, having a UX control module inside that uses synthetic checks. And if the task is to learn about failures quicker than customers, I will tell you why all these APM systems are not needed. Also, nowadays health metrics are a fashionable feature of APM and I will show how you can build them without APM. 

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.

In this article, we benchmark the performance of MySQL 8 default configuration vs. innodb_dedicated_server enabled configuration vs. the configuration recommended by MySQL Performance Tuning Service.

Types of smart traffic lights: adaptive and neural networks

Adaptive works at relatively simple intersections, where the rules and possibilities for switching phases are quite obvious. Adaptive management is only applicable where there is no constant loading in all directions, otherwise it simply has nothing to adapt to – there are no free time windows. The first adaptive control intersections appeared in the United States in the early 70s of the last century. Unfortunately, they have reached Russia only now, their number according to some estimates does not exceed 3,000 in the country.

Neural networks – a higher level of traffic regulation. They take into account a lot of factors at once, which are not even always obvious. Their result is based on self-learning: the computer receives live data on the bandwidth and selects the maximum value by all possible algorithms, so that in total, as many vehicles as possible pass from all sides in a comfortable mode per unit of time. How this is done, usually programmers answer – we do not know, the neural network is a black box, but we will reveal the basic principles to you…

Adaptive traffic lights use, at least, leading companies in Russia, rather outdated technology for counting vehicles at intersections: physical sensors or video background detector. A capacitive sensor or an induction loop only sees the vehicle at the installation site-for a few meters, unless of course you spend millions on laying them along the entire length of the roadway. The video background detector shows only the filling of the roadway with vehicles relative to this roadway. The camera should clearly see this area, which is quite difficult at a long distance due to the perspective and is highly susceptible to atmospheric interference: even a light snowstorm will be diagnosed as the presence of traffic – the background video detector does not distinguish the type of detection.

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.