FRISKIE wrote:Hey Steve - improved DDoS protection will be worth the wait.
Quick question though - how will this affect payouts?
No money was lost, but the servers are inaccessible.
All site operations are offline for an indefinite period of time. If Chris can connect, he will pay all accounts down to zero. If it turns out that the only solution is to physically move the servers, then it could be a few days before he can gain access to the system again.
This issue is likely going to require a dramatic re-architecting of the system. The biggest problem we have right now is that we can't figure out what actually is happening because the customer service representatives at Verizon are saying their system is working. We gave up on Cloudflare because everyone there acted like a robot and couldn't tell us whether they could protect non-HTTP traffic.
I think that the first solution we'll try is simply increasing the connection speed to 1 Gb, and seeing if that is enough to allow us to determine what type of traffic is coming through and filter it. At the very least, we could get the site into a half-working state that doesn't trigger whatever happens with Verizon, and then just let the attacker run out of money.
If that doesn't work, then I think that the next step is to figure out if there is a VPS server that can get more bandwidth and filter connections as a proxy. This method will reduce profitability by about 1% due to increased orphan rates. The third choice is to physically move the servers to a datacenter that has enough bandwidth, but I don't think that any such datacenters that charge a low enough price exist where the pool could remain profitable.