Cool Ideas, which came under a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack over the weekend, has apologized to users and detailed the action it is taking to prevent service interruptions in future.
According to a statement from the service provider, the attack started at 10h30 on Saturday 23 November, at which time its automatic mitigation systems in London were already “scrubbing dirty traffic”.
The scrubbing system was implemented after a DDoS attack on Cool Ideas in September, but the massive and prolonged attack this weekend overwhelmed their ability to cope.
By late afternoon on Saturday the network was close to being overwhelmed and Cool Ideas worked overnight with its upstream provider to re-architect the system to decline DDoS traffic.
Although the attack originated mostly in the UK, a secondary attack on Sunday came from local exchanges.
Cool Ideas and NAPAfrica were able to stop the attack, and the company is implementing additional capacity and filtering devices at local exchange points.
By late Sunday afternoon the system started returning to normal with improved service levels. By 23h00 on Sunday the attack was fully mitigated and the attack ceased at around 01h00 on Monday.
Cool Ideas urges subscribers to sign up for SMS alerts so they can be fully informed about network issues as they happen.