Aryan Blaauw One Sunday late last month, administrators at Orlando, Florida-based TorGuard were in high spirits. They had just successfully rebuffed the latest in a series of increasingly powerful denial-of-service attacks designed to cripple their virtual private networking service. Despite torrents of junk traffic that reached peaks as high as 15Gbps, the admins had neutralized the offensive by locking down the TorGuard servers and then moving them behind the protective services of anti-DoS service CloudFlare. “This seemed to anger the attackers, however, because on Monday things got a bit more personal,” TorGuard administrator Ben Van Pelt told Ars. “Unable to spam, DDoS, hack, or social engineer us, they employed the tactics of the ‘4chan party van.’ Throughout the day our office received multiple unrequested deliveries from local pizza chains, Chinese food, and one large order of sushi. A handful of local electricians and plumbing services were also disappointed to be turned away. To my knowledge no fake calls have been placed to law enforcement yet, however nothing would surprise me at this point.” The two-month-long campaign of harassment and attacks, which Van Pelt suspects was carried out by a competing virtual private networking service, illustrates the lengths some people will go to goad their online adversaries. His experience provides a vivid account of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a relentless stream of distributed denial-of-service attacks and ultimately what can be done to mitigate them. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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How one site beat back botnets, spammers and the “4chan party van”
It’s not time to say goodbye to the old storage network quite yet, but a new combination of cloud, networking, and storage technology might mark the beginning of the end for SANs—Seagate has introduced a new storage architecture that puts Ethernet directly on the disk drive. Called the Kinetic Open Storage Platform, the new approach turns disks themselves into servers, delivering data over the network to applications using an open application interface. The Kinetic platform is a combination of an open programming interface and intelligence and a network interface installed in the storage device itself. It’s targeted mostly at companies looking to adopt the same sort of architecture in their data centers that they use to connect to cloud storage providers such as Amazon. While the architectural approach Seagate is taking is an evolution of work already done by cloud giants such as Google and Facebook, it turns cloud-style storage into a commodity. And that could change how companies small and large think of networked storage—especially as they move toward using newer software development approaches to build their applications or move applications built on Amazon or other cloud services back within their firewalls. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments 
On Thursday, Zynga released its third quarter results and showed a loss of only $68,000—far better than the embattled gaming company’s losses of $52 million this time last year. And, because that loss was small, beating Zynga’s own expectations for Q3, its shares got a 12 percent boost in after-hours trading on Wall Street, Thursday evening. Still, that modicum of good news is just a sugar coat on an otherwise dismal earnings statement. Zynga’s Q3 revenue was only $203 million, which constitutes a decrease of 36 percent year-over-year, and a decrease of 12 percent from the quarter before. Also, Daily and Monthly Active Users were both down for Zynga. The company lost almost a quarter of its Daily Active Users compared to Q2 2013 (and that statistic is becoming a bit of a trend: we saw that exact headline on last quarter’s earnings report, too). And Zynga lost nearly 30 percent of its Monthly Active Users from Q2 2013. From Q3 2012, the statistics were down 49 percent and 57 percent, respectively. But it looks like Zynga will be progressing conservatively from here. For the fourth quarter of 2013, the company projected revenue in the range of $175 million to $185 million (a substantial decrease from this quarter’s earnings) and a net loss in the range of $31 million to $21 million. After a summer in which the company laid off 18 percent of its workforce and shuttered Omgpop , a games company it acquired for $200 million, Zynga’s next few months will be watched carefully to see how (and whether) the company will weather 2014. Read on Ars Technica | Comments