Dear SecureWebs Customer:

Yesterday afternoon some of you may have noticed an outage that struck network wide.  It was a "SYN Flood and IP Spoof Attack" large enough to completely disrupt regular traffic.  If you want a details description of this attack you will find one on the CERT site at:

     http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-1996-21.html

SYN flood attacks have not represented much of a problem to SecureWebs in the past years and now it has moved to the top of the list.  The bad news is with the current IP protocol technology the Internet runs on, it is impossible to eliminate IP-spoofed packets. 

How do we protect the SecureWebs network and your service here? 
Nobody can guarantee their network is immune to a SNY flood attack.  Everyone who is working in an large IT department exposed to the Internet is likely to already have acknowledge this bitter truth. SecureWebs is trying hard to turn our experiences to our advantage and we believe we can ensuring attacks are less successful. Sometimes there's nothing like adversity to give you a new look at your surroundings. 

One major move is to upgrade the IOS in the edge routers to represent Cisco's latest and best.  This will be accomplished when two duplicate new and larger routers are set to arrive - one to replace our current edge router and one to be on standby should the primary router ever experience a hardware problem.  We will advise you of the scheduled time when we have it.  Certainly the horse-power of our edge routers will take a leap forward.

We also have invested in network monitoring tools dedicated to searching and discovering abnormalities in the network traffic.  They have already paid off and were helpful in discovering the attack yesterday.  In addition, we will be increasing the capacity of the network on October 24th by 20% - which should give us a little more "wiggle room" for the smaller attacks.  The list is longer and we won't bore you with the details but you can be sure we will be adopting the best practices for limit the effects of further attacks.   

What does the future hold?
There is a growing pool of individuals that are launching attacks because the pool of world-wide idiots to draw from is rather large.  If every imbecile who sat down in front of a keyboard on the Internet decided to cause as much trouble as they could the Internet would be useless. And that is exactly what we fear.  The size of the attacks have taken down the largest networks and there may be some rough times ahead for anyone who had decided they need their service to be online 24/7.  Nobody should be forecasting an Internet that is available 100% of the time to their customer base.  This is simply not the reality on the Internet today. 100% network uptime has never been possible and seems to be more in doubt this year than anytime before. 

What we do believe is that SecureWebs will continue to refine our fighting techniques to keep you online every minute.  We intend to live up to our name, "SecureWebs" to the extent it is humanly possible.  We will always tell you exactly what is going on and be willing to admit our failures when they happen.  The good news is that some exiting features we will be adding to your service in the coming weeks such as new anti-spam tools, control panels for shared-hosting customers and other services will help to remind us why we are on the Internet in the first place.  

We still have the feeling here at SecureWebs that we are participating in the most exciting evolution to shape our lives since the printing press.  Please don't hesitate to ask any questions you may have or make suggestions that can improve our service. 

Regards,

The SecureWebs Staff