There was a major attack on another QuickBooks shared hosting company recently. This type of thing doesn’t get announced to the public, but has been news in the trade for weeks.
The outage lasted most of a working week; even longer for some customers. All of the small businesses using the service were completely shut out of their QuickBooks.
These customers could not even get access to their backups from the service provider.*
The provider said it was a DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service). A Denial-of-Service is a type of attack where the attackers (bad guys) prevent legitimate users from accessing the service or network because it is too busy handling bogus traffic. Often it is a hacker group or sponsor that gets thousands of zombie computers to just aim at the server IP address, flooding it with illegitimate traffic and preventing the system from being able to respond to legitimate requests.
Consider what would happen if there were thousands of computers calling your single line phone non-stop for a solid week (robo-callers, but on steroids). The phone would ring constantly with useless traffic, and it would likely prevent you from receiving calls you actually want to receive.
At some point you would have to just turn off or unplug the phone to keep all those junk calls from ringing through.
This is a Denial-of-Service attack. You phone service no longer works for you, even though no one actually damaged your phone or service. You just couldn’t use it, and the callers you really wanted to hear from couldn’t reach you. Denied.
Noobeh crafts our cloud hosting services to have protections from DDoS attack.
Shared IP addresses and single points of entry represent a big vulnerability for hosting platforms. With Noobeh services, our customers don’t share IP or network addresses so there isn’t a single point to attack that could disrupt the service of multiple systems. In fact, we don’t provision any resources that are shared among customers; each delivery has its own infrastructure resources so each customer solution stands apart from all others. If the addresses for a single client were to come under attack, we simply change them, mitigating the issue. This is among the benefits not just of the Noobeh delivery model, but also of the Microsoft Azure platform and how we use it.
Give us a call today and let us work up a plan to deploy your applications and data on a safer and more secure solution crafted just for your business on the Azure platform. Its the best way to keep your business running even when others aren’t.
Mike, the IT guy
NOOBEH cloud tech
*Note about our cloud backups: Noobeh not only backs up the systems and data on Azure, but we also use a secondary cloud archive that can be accessed even if something were to happen to the Azure platform or regional Microsoft datacenters. We think it makes sense to have data backed up in more than one place, and we think you’d agree.
