[HN Gopher] Microsoft's Azure portal down following new claims o...
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       Microsoft's Azure portal down following new claims of DDoS attacks
        
       Author : donutshop
       Score  : 83 points
       Date   : 2023-06-09 15:54 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
        
       | AtNightWeCode wrote:
       | I don't really understand how a DDoS can happen when the portal
       | is using MS routing. Should be a simple fix. More likely some
       | misconfiguration.
        
         | MuffinFlavored wrote:
         | i wonder how much traffic it would take to DDoS Azure's Web UI.
         | You're talking about like 1,000,000+ orchestrated/coordinated
         | silently hijacked machines all... what? curl'ing in a loop some
         | API of theirs?
        
           | AtNightWeCode wrote:
           | One problem could be JWT. Anybody can use the bearer tokens
           | from the portal and then use K6 to flood any endpoint. If you
           | are willing to pay for the attack which states often do.
        
           | re-thc wrote:
           | Most people over-estimate what DDoS protection provides.
           | There are all sorts of tricky attacks.
           | 
           | The APIs are now so complex there are lots of layers - load
           | balancers, gateways, kubernetes, etc etc. The attackers can
           | exploit any amount of them until they find it. It could be a
           | bug e.g. integer overflow on a specific header or the lower
           | TCP layers, etc.
           | 
           | It can also be very tricky to detect and stop. You may
           | imagine the attacks to be constant but they are not. They do
           | enough to deny service but not enough to be detected. It
           | makes it very hard to differentiate from real traffic.
        
       | jakedata wrote:
       | Flawless instant access for me. Clearly not a total impact.
       | Didn't even notice until I saw the headline.
        
         | AtNightWeCode wrote:
         | You are too late to the party. The problem was between 15:10
         | UTC and 17:30 UTC on 9 Jun 2023.
        
         | NicoJuicy wrote:
         | It was fixed an hour ago :)
        
       | tatersolid wrote:
       | Can confirm the impact appears total for the Azure portal;
       | Microsoft sells DDoS protection as part of Front Door and other
       | Azure services. Do they not use it themselves?
        
         | re-thc wrote:
         | > Microsoft sells DDoS protection as part of Front Door
         | 
         | They got in via a Back Door.
         | 
         | A lot of places sell DDoS protection. Most of it only ever
         | cover the basics. With the size of botnets, hacked computers,
         | etc that are easily and cheaply available for rent - a lot of
         | so called DDoS protection services can't compete.
         | 
         | You really need to dig deep into what they mean by DDoS
         | protection.
         | 
         | What layers are covered? What type of services are covered?
         | 
         | Also e.g. when they mention they cover volumetric attacks, it's
         | often marketing more than the real deal.
         | 
         | E.g. a provider sells $x of total protection (that number means
         | across all PoPs, so usually $x / 30 or less). It can still go
         | down if you focus all your attacks on a few PoPs that matter.
        
           | MrOwnPut wrote:
           | It's also important whether it's active or passive.
           | 
           | Really important for game servers to have active DDoS
           | protection, like what OVH offers. Not one that kicks in after
           | the attack is detected, otherwise your players get booted,
           | which is the goal of the attacker.
        
             | re-thc wrote:
             | > Not one that kicks in after the attack is detected
             | 
             | You can't even detect the attack. I've seen 1s that are
             | well disguised or the patterns are so short there's not
             | enough data to tell if it's an attack or real traffic. And
             | yet it's enough to crash your connection or the service
             | itself.
        
         | donutshop wrote:
         | Am wondering the same thing. I have yet to meet anybody that
         | does aside from Microsoft themselves.
        
           | tatersolid wrote:
           | We used Front Door for a while for our SaaS application, but
           | actually had to turn it off because of a large customer whose
           | janky internal IDP broke because of the mere presence of IPv6
           | on the Azure Front Door CNAME records. It worked well for
           | about a week for everyone else.
        
           | nullindividual wrote:
           | I use it for a number of web properties.
        
           | nwah1 wrote:
           | I worked at a commodities brokerage that used it. No
           | problems.
        
         | nullindividual wrote:
         | You can tell the error on the Portal is coming from AFD thanks
         | to the style/format of it.
        
       | soco wrote:
       | I'm working on it right now, 45 minutes after the submission.
       | Maybe not everywhere? Maybe fixed already?
        
       | ojintoad wrote:
       | It's very odd because it's only new page loads. Existing metrics
       | pages I've been refreshing keep showing new data.
        
         | tatersolid wrote:
         | We see the same thing. One of my team is sailing around in the
         | portal, even opening new tabs and it all is just working.
         | 
         | But I can't create a new session, even when remoted into an
         | Azure-hosted VM. All our servers and services seem to be
         | running fine; it just seems to be the portal.azure.com website
         | that is impacted.
        
         | Izikiel43 wrote:
         | Probably because the actual portal service call happens at new
         | page load. Metric pages and everything else are data
         | plane/control plane info most likely, which is coming from
         | other services.
         | 
         | An easy way to validate this would be using fidler or similar
         | to analyze the traffic that happens in the loaded page.
        
         | mynameisvlad wrote:
         | That would be hitting separate API endpoints which are not
         | hosted in the same place as the portal itself.
        
       | error9348 wrote:
       | Interestingly, https://preview.portal.azure.com/ is up.
        
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       (page generated 2023-06-09 23:02 UTC)