Stop Using Digital Ocean Now: The Aftermath

by sdogruyol • 13 years ago

84 96 13 years ago

moneyrich2• 13 years ago

that's rough

they obviously only care about conversion and not validating the user before hand in (any) way, so brutal.

From verizon I got a similar answer they couldn't discuss my own account with me after me giving them my social and all that - wtf. i hung up and tried another service rep and they gave me too much of my own personal info with out verifying any of my personal details and anyone elses' on my plans, which is kind of scary (Wtf)

also i really really like the idea of daily backups to dropbox, with like 1TB of backups i need a solution, and this seems like a great one. thanks for coming up with that

phildini• 13 years ago

you're going to back up 1TB of data to dropbox?

robomartin• 13 years ago

Is it fair to tyrannically close someone’s account up and accuse him or further treat him as a liar ?

Isn't this what Google does on a daily basis to users of their various services? There seem to be no consequences for them and less than zero interest in improving any of it.

There are companies that can cause your business untold financial damage through these kinds of actions. For some reason they continue to evade responsibility in financial, moral and ethical terms. It sucks.

josh2600• 13 years ago

The difference is: you are the product for google and not the customer. Trust me, google doesn't treat advertisers the same way it treats free gmail users.

objclxt• 13 years ago

Google often shuts down advertiser accounts with little or no notice. You only have to search for "adsense" or "adwords" along with "banned". Some of those are with good reason - others are not.

Adirael• 13 years ago

Previous post was submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438761

ogghead• 13 years ago

Sad to say, the same thing happened to me and the support messages were unhelpful to say the least. They have several copy-and-paste answers they use far too eagerly.

And it's asinine to ask someone to update billing information when they've locked your account from accessing the billing info page. Two of us have seen that with DO. Makes them look quite sloppy.

jensenbox• 13 years ago

I left them long ago after super crap support.

No thanks and good luck.

veemjeem12• 13 years ago

Most online services that are under $5 a month rarely come with support. I feel bad for startups that charge so little per month because usually the less you charge, the more demanding the customer is. Virtualized servers tend to require more support than say, online accounting or email products.

People who go to Digital Ocean are going for cheap VPS solutions. If they had money to blow, they'd probably be with amazon or rackspace.

bliti• 13 years ago

I've also had a bad experience with DO in production. Moved to Webfaction and have never looked back. They are just excellent in every which way.

pekk• 13 years ago

Funny that DO's public response was to demand permission to discuss the case publicly, when apparently they had not discussed it with the customer concerned!

dllthomas• 13 years ago

I think that is the appropriate public response. Not discussing it with the customer is obviously an inappropriate private response.

veemjeem12• 13 years ago

I think they have. The customer in question simply didn't put it in his blog post. I feel as though the customer may be presenting the facts in such a way to make DO look bad. I don't see anywhere in his blog post about his DDOS attack. His server was shutdown because it was running a DDOS attack. My guess is that his server got owned...

People get disproportionally mad when their server gets shutdown, for a service that charges $5 a month for a VPS. Most people probably wouldn't get angry at Netflix if they cancelled their $7 a month account, but shutting down a VPS feels like a personal attack.

If you pay $5 a month for a service, don't expect a customer representative to hold your hand and debug your server troubles.

JeremyBanks• 13 years ago

OP, can you please confirm whether or not you made this post quoting a reply from Digital Ocean in the previous thread, as [1] claims you did?

Now i've received an answer from DO. I seriously dont know how i did a DDos.

Here it's.

Greetings,

Based upon the tcpdump results, I have again confirmed that your droplet was indeed performing a Denial of Service attack.

With this information, we are unable to restore services to your account.

If this is true, it is disingenuous not to mention this reply in your post.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6439501

sdogruyol10• 13 years ago

The thing is that they wanted to stay private when i posted this so i immediately removed and now waiting for them. By the way i received that response after 2 hours of the topic opening. They weren't answering me at all before HN post

veemjeem12• 13 years ago

So did your server get owned? Or was the DDOS attack a result of a bug in your code?

Also, why do you delete your posts on HN? Do you only keep posts that make your viewpoint look favorable?

outworlder2• 13 years ago

DigitalOcean requested me to send a paper which authorizes them to disclose the information in public. It was midnight here in Turkey and i was asleep.
And now after nearly 10 hours or so i still haven’t heart from DO

What about timezone differences? You were asleep, they could be, too.

sdogruyol10• 13 years ago

That's a possibility. But at this time yesterday they were really really active.

outworlder2• 13 years ago

By the way, someone should watch this thread and start saving all posts by the OP. Last thread he deleted a lot of them.

mechinn• 13 years ago

Wait... did I miss something or did you send snailmail and expect a response within 10 hours?

Also I am nowhere close to being a lawyer but I'm pretty sure if they disclosed your private information on here without your written permission you could sue them probably for more than either of these 2 posts are worth against them.

sp332• 13 years ago

I think he scanned the letter and emailed it.

antr• 13 years ago

Some months ago a tried to open an account with DO, but my account was blocked by DO before creating a droplet because my dad, who has the same name as I do, had already used the service. DO wanted me to verify my identity, address, etc.

I can't stand such friction, so I stayed with AWS, who have never had an issue with having a customer with very similar or equal name to another. Clearly, there is something wrong in DO's identity/fraud detection process, and even more wrong is the fact that they are locking user's production accounts without any warning at all.

jd0072• 13 years ago

I ran into the same problem just last week when I tried to make an account to try it out.

I added a credit card to my account without a promotion code, but later on found out about the new promotion they are doing (free $10). I realized that you cannot enter a promo code if you didn't do it the first time you add payment to an account, even if the account is otherwise still new (I didn't do anything with it after adding the payment card).

So I de-activated my account, and made another one, entered the same payment info but with the promo code this time. Then my account was instantly locked for using the same credit card, and I received an email shortly after citing section 2.6 of their ToS which prohibited users from using the same payment card on multiple accounts (even though my previous account was de-activated).

Their trial/promo code system really needs to be revamped as I spent way more time figuring out how to put the code in than actually trying out their product. Also their fraud detection system is perhaps too sensitive? I mean I should be able to re-use payment cards if my old account was de-activated...

arthulia2• 13 years ago

They have really quick customer service; they probably would have added the promotion to your account if you had contacted them.

opendais4• 13 years ago

Ya, I contacted them to get them to apply the promo since I didn't have alot of faith in their automation/tooling.

Honestly, for the price, some level of issue/limitation. If you are charging 50% [or more, depending on whom you compare to] of the price when compared to a major competitor, you have to cut somewhere. It seems DO has uneven support quality [like any low end provider] and smaller features set [combination of time and $$].

Then again, people think I'm too generous with Linode and the issues they've had [they cost twice as much for similar specs to DO] so maybe it isn't just the price point.

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

The things which i still don’t understand.... Is my privacy is more important than my user experience or happiness of the service ? Even if i want them to tell what really happened ?

Well, yes. It is completely appropriate that they aren't going to discuss your logs and other private details in public without your permission. You don't understand that, for real?

They have no obligation to discuss your case in public at all, although it might be wise for them to do so and explain themselves, if you are generating lots of bad feelings for them.

(They do, I'd agree, have an obligation to discuss your case with you and tell you why they closed your account. It's not really clear to me if they did so; it kind of seems like they did so, something to do with DDoS.)

slig2• 13 years ago

On the other hand, here's my experience with Linode.

Another host company claimed that one of my machines was doing port scan on their network. Linode opened a ticket and preemptively blocked all outgoing connections to the SSH port from my machine.

I had enough time to see what's going on and chatted with a very responsive support. The aftermath is that I moved all my data to a new linode, waited to for the DNS propagation and killed the old linode. No service disruption and no all-nighters.

I seriously can't recommend they enough. And yes, I'm aware of the security problems they had months ago, but I bet that they don't want any more damage to their brand and they're working very hard to no let that happen again.

veemjeem12• 13 years ago

Not all VPS service providers are treated alike. Linode is probably a mid-tier VPS. Their cheapest plan is $20, which is 4x more expensive than Digital Ocean's cheapest plan of $5 a month. I would guess that most of the ultra cheap VPS plans probably won't come with a network engineer to help you.

slig2• 13 years ago

Agreed. If I'm trying something new, or just playing with, I could try a new and cheaper host ($5/m is less than a starbucks coffee where I live).

But if I'm running something that pays me money, there's no doubt that I'll choose the best provider. And the best provider, for my requirements, is only $15 more expensive.

meritt• 13 years ago

His server was probably broken into, someone used it for DDOS'ing, DO shut it down and customer has no clue what's going on.

jjoe• 13 years ago

Sorry but I must be blunt... What do people expect for < $8/mo service? Should DO spend a few man hours to fix the issue at hand (abuse or not) and very much burn the 7 months worth of service income from this account? This is an unreasonable expectation.

Something has to give. Yes we've all built and sold products and believe in providing an impeccable service worth far greater than the sum of its parts. Because we're in it to please everyone and build a reputation. But hosting is different. There are real costs for not taking action (upstream null routing, blacklisting, chargeback fees, fraud, abuse, etc).

I'm definitely playing devil's advocate and yes I go above and beyond for my clients. Never have I kicked a client to the curb for abuse they haven't originated. But DO is unmanaged and acquires clients by the shovel. Something has to give.

For the record, I did publicly state here in HN that DO's business plan doesn't add up and this is one of the side effects.

opendais4• 13 years ago

This.

It was the same thing the budget dedicated providers did before 'cloud' and 'vps' became popular/viable technologies. I do think DO's business plan does make sense tho, many of those budget providers are large, profitable business today.

nwh• 13 years ago

I expected a budget service, but they've been anything but that. Their support staff aren't just reading off a script, their instances are fast and downtime non existent. In this case the user fucked up and was made part of a botnet, and DO were forced to protect their network. I'm happier running my services on DO than on any other host.

j_baker2• 13 years ago

Abuse is expensive for a cloud service provider. Being thorough about it helps keep prices down.

adamlj• 13 years ago

About a week ago I got to experience Digital Oceans very tight suspension policy first hand. What happened was that one of the accounts I manage was suspended. I had to go through a very long and detailed validation process before they understood that they had done wrong (they admitted to doing an error and apologized). But when my account was activated again my droplet had been destroyed..

After some more time they managed to resolve this and I'm again a happy DO user but I wish that they take a look at their policies. Just the fear of knowing that they can shut you down by mistake for a day or two is bad enough to not use them. They should have a policy where they at least call you and talk to you before they do anything.

erichocean• 13 years ago

These kinds of seemingly random suspensions at DO are starting to concern me. I've got a service with ~10K active users I'm migrating to DO as we speak, but man! I'm starting to feel like it might be professionally negligent to do so if they're trigger-happy with shutting down instances.

It'd be nice if DO had some way to communicate "hey, this VM matters to my business, PLEASE don't do anything stupid/automated without contacting me first", but that's probably too much to ask for the cost.

Gah. Back to AWS. This sucks. :/

orenbarzilai• 13 years ago

Isn't that a major violation of their SLA? Have you consulted with a lawyer?

sdogruyol10• 13 years ago

What do you mean by a major violation of their SLA?

veemjeem12• 13 years ago

Even if they violated their SLA, the most DO could do is offer a $5 refund, which isn't that big a deal. It's probably too costly to hire a lawyer over a $5 server.

Also, I don't think the SLA would include things like getting hacked, or running illegal services.

kbar13• 13 years ago

is this... a joke?

PeterisP• 13 years ago

There may be all kinds of valid reasons to validate acounts, check documents and ownership of cards, etc.

None of those reasons excuse putting services offline while this validation is happening - first try validation, give it some reasonable timeframe, and only then cut or don't cut the service depending on results. Is it really so complicated?

zagi• 13 years ago

Hi, this is Ben, CEO and Co-Founder of DigitalOcean, we have received the document and will discuss the matter publicly.

-----

All times are UTC.

Our monitoring picked up a malicious UDP traffic pattern on 2013-09-08 00:58:23. A ticket was then opened with the customer at : 2013-09-08 01:05:55 roughly 7 minutes later.

The customer informed us that it was a script that was crawling in the background.

We informed the customer that it may be a good idea to check through the virtual server to see if there were any signs of a compromise just in case.

The droplet was unlocked at this time.

A second UDP pattern was detected on 2013-09-24 12:27:09 and a ticket was opened 2013-09-24 12:27:14 to request more information from the customer.

Because this was already a second occurrence we had to do a more thorough follow up. Discussing the matter with the customer, he informed us that it was a mysql db dump script that was pushing data to dropbox.

He provided us a link to a github project that he wrote, we asked further questions. Specifically if you are writing a mysql dump remotely why are the packets being sent as UDP? Additionally if the final destination is dropbox that would be an SSL encrypted connection and again why would that transfer go over UDP?

We reviewed the code of the dump-to-cloud project and it was using the dropbox sdk, here is where the file transfer is initiated:

   def upload_file(file_name)

        client = DropboxClient.new(@access_token)

        file = open(file_name)

        puts 'Uploading file!! Please wait.'

        response = client.put_file("/#{file_name}", file)

        puts "uploaded:", response.inspect

    end

From the dropbox SDK here is where it sets the destination for the file transfer:

   def build_url(url, params=nil, content_server=false) # :nodoc:

        port = 443

        host = content_server ? Dropbox::API_CONTENT_SERVER : Dropbox::API_SERVER

        versioned_url = "/#{Dropbox::API_VERSION}#{url}"



        target = URI::Generic.new("https", nil, host, port, nil, versioned_url, nil, nil, nil)



        #add a locale param if we have one

        #initialize a params object is we don't have one

        if @locale

            (params ||= {})['locale']=@locale

        end



        if params

            target.query = params.collect {|k,v|

                CGI.escape(k) + "=" + CGI.escape(v)

            }.join("&")

        end



        target.to_s

    end

The code that actually transfers the file from the dropbox sdk:

    def do_put(url, headers=nil, body=nil)  # :nodoc:

        assert_authorized

        uri = URI.parse(url)

        do_http_with_body(uri, Net::HTTP::Put.new(uri.request_uri, headers), body)

    end

The file is transferred via HTTPS since it is going to a secure service and HTTPS would rely on TCP for the data transfer, again to ensure that all packets are delivered.

Given that it was the second incident that a UDP traffic pattern was observed in less than 30 days and that the information the customer provided regarding the traffic did not match up, we made a determination that in fact it couldn't be this script that was generating the traffic.

All of this information was relayed to the customer that we did not believe that the traffic in question was related to this script because it would not rely on UDP, an insecure protocol to deliver files to a secure endpoint where data integrity was of the utmost importance.

Unfortunately, we could not unlock the account at this time because the information we received was not clear and we already had two incidents of outbound UDP traffic that appeared to be disruptive and abusive in nature totaling 1Gbps as if it were a denial of service attack, typically associated with UDP packets.

sdogruyol10• 13 years ago

Hello Ben, thanks for the response. Fırst of all at first ticket i told that the only possibility of having an UDP outgoing is that script that i wrote.

Other than that i've no other activity or script that can generate that much traffic. Haven't you even considered that my droplet may be compromised or being attacked ?

Instead of letting me know what exactly happened or which processes were running at that time you just locked the account and accused me.

Couldn't you even look at the access logs or so to see which IPs login into the droplet and then take your action later instead of closing it instantly?

jrmiii• 13 years ago

Looks like they looked at the code and determined it could not be UDP from your script.

I think they did consider your droplets to be compromised.

I think at issue here is that they have to assume that the droplet owner is the malicious party, if they don't lock your account, they can't stop you from creating more droplets.

I think you may have a point that they did not clearly explain to you why your account was locked.

However, this incident makes me more likely to continue using Digital Ocean. With the new private networking they have in NYC2, I for one am thrilled that they do this kind of proactive monitoring.

veemjeem12• 13 years ago

Most cheap VPS providers would not go do that much work to decipher the root cause of the problem. When you have a server sending 1Gbps traffic, it's easier to shut it down than tail log files to figure out the cause. Digital Ocean can't do that for every customer that pays $5 a month. If you want a high level support, you should have picked a mid-level VPS like rackspace.

chc2• 13 years ago

According to Ben's account, they did suggest to you that the droplet might be compromised. That is what they believed to be the case.

sdogruyol10• 13 years ago

I was also tremendously happy with DO and their service. But what if you get your production apps down without even any notification and proper reasoning ? That's the thing which makes you feel insecure.

csomar5• 13 years ago

Unmanaged = Your responsibility

I got my server down with DO many times at first. It was a problem with the CentOs package; but it was indeed my responsibility to fix it.

You are responsible of securing your server.

thecoffman• 13 years ago

This is:

a.) pretty good evidence that DO did their due diligence and

b.) way more thorough investigation than I would have expected from a "value" vps provider.

cortesoft• 13 years ago

I am curious to see the blog poster's response to this, as your course of action seems completely reasonable.

May I ask what about the UDP traffic made it appear abusive?

gozzoo• 13 years ago

how about 'totaling 1Gbps'?

nerfhammer• 13 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6447635

veemjeem12• 13 years ago

I think it's a bit sad that you have to go to such great lengths to protect your company's image. This was a very obvious case of customer fault. He admitted that he doesn't know if his server was hacked. The customer probably should have looked into the issue before making a inflammatory blog post.

Maybe if you guys charged more you wouldn't get these ultra-cheap customers who think they should get 24/7 support for paying $5 a month.

sdogruyol10• 13 years ago

Being attacked or even getting compromised is customer fault ? Okay i get that. But what about closing the account instantly, not notifying the customer, accusing that customer of being a cheap liar and treating them in a bad way?

opendais4• 13 years ago

So you shutdown the VM due to what appears to be a compromise. That is typical host behavior at least.

Locking the user out of their account seems...odd, tho. I've never had that happen, personally, at any host.

csomar5• 13 years ago

Maybe Ben can explain what "locking" an account is actually is. If the customer did, in fact, break the TOS, I think it's logical to lock his account.

csomar5• 13 years ago

After 1 day or so i tried to reach my server but couldn’t even ping or ssh to my server. I thought that DO was down but the truth was that they’ve locked my account without any notification. Can you imagine this?

The customer is lying in this case?

joshdance• 13 years ago

Good reply Ben. I am actually a DO customer I think you've explained yourself well. Good to remember that there are always two sides to the story. I'm sure both parties could have done things differently. But thanks for the disclosure.

orclev2• 13 years ago

A far more thorough response than I expected to see. It does look like, best case scenario his instance was compromised and being used for malicious purposes, worst case scenario he was actively doing something malicious himself. In either case taking the compromised/malicious instance offline is the appropriate first response in the case of an active attack underway.

I think I have to agree with a comment someone else made in the previous thread about this, with the rise of cheap VPS services we're seeing an influx of people unqualified and unprepared to run their own internet routable servers and things like this are the outcome of that. When you choose to stand up a VPS with a service like DO you take on the responsibility of keeping it secure and preventing it from engaging in malicious activity. If you fail at that task, the consequence is your servers will be shutdown for the good of the internet as a whole. If you are either unprepared or incapable of dealing with that responsibility you should be paying for a hosting service that's prepared to offer those services for you.

I say this as someone that currently has accounts with a number of VPS providers where I do take the responsibility of managing my servers seriously, as well as previously helping to administer a server that was compromised and taken offline until such a time as we had performed a full audit and verified our code on a new instance.

You should be prepared to treat a compromise of your servers the same as any other form of disaster. Treat it the same as if a flood happened and took out the facility you were hosted out of. You should have a backup plan in place so you can roll over to your backup until such time as you can fix the "broken" server, or else accept the downtime.

quicksilver03• 13 years ago

Instead of locking the account, couldn't you just have blocked all outgoing UDP packets from the IP address of the customer's droplet?

Blocking UDP would have stopped the attack, it would have given you a time window to contact the customer (allowing for time zone differences) and would have given both parties a chance to resolve the issue in private and with much less drama.

(speaking as a current customer of DigitalOcean, using UDP (thru collectd) to monitor my droplet and starting to have uneasy feelings).

csomar5• 13 years ago

And now after nearly 10 hours or so i still haven’t heart from DO.

There is a problem on the Internet is that people demand things NOW. Really? How long will it take for stuff to happen in real life (especially if you are dealing with government).

Some stuff does happen immediately (like registering or purchasing something), but stuff which requires human intervention is obviously slow. And it requires time.

Yes, you can have 24/7 response. But only if you hire someone (probably 3 persons) working for you round the clock which will mean paying thousands of $$ per month and not $5/month.

arthulia2• 13 years ago

10 hours is unreasonably long for someone who is running an application that other users need to access. People are not going to be happy if Farmville is suddenly not remembering all the cows they milked last time they were logged in. This is about keeping customers happy down the chain.

That said, I actually really like DO and I've only had prompt, helpful responses from their customer service. I don't build apps but it is an excellent personal vps, and I still recommend them to my friends when they are looking for one.

veemjeem12• 13 years ago

If you're paying $5 a month, don't expect to have support turn around times under 1 day. If you're running Farmville, I would hope that you're paying more than $5 a month for your server.

skizm• 13 years ago

I use DO for a messing around on a small web app I'm developing. Within 24 hours of having my droplet up the root password was guessed and my machine was used for some DDoS. Granted I was an idiot for not changing the password immediately but I definitely felt like DO should just use ssh key validation like AWS does right off the bat. That deters attackers from even trying brute force attacks in the first place.

Anyway, I checked the logs and pretty much the minute my machine was deployed a script was guessing my password (lots of failed login attempts for "root" and "oracle"). This probably means someone knows DO's IP addresses and their automatically generated password scheme (all lower case alpha characters of a fixed length).

I reported the incident and destroyed my droplet since there was nothing important on it. When I heard back from DO I basically got (paraphrasing here) "you should install fail2ban next time". Case closed. I'm not a big customer or anything so I don't expect premium support or anything but I feel like someone should have looked into the attack a bit more. Seems like a lot of people are experiencing the same thing.

I guess what I am saying is you get what you pay for (it is only 5 bucks after all).

EDIT: Still using DO. I was just a bit more careful next time I deployed a droplet.

adrianlmm• 13 years ago

I'm a DO user, I created my account 2 months ago and I'm a happy customer.

j_baker2• 13 years ago

And now after nearly 10 hours or so i still haven’t heart from DO. Also now that the HN topic is not on the front pages no one is getting updated about the situation. That’s why i wanted to write this post.

I won't speak for everyone, but I can personally live without having updates on the OP's Digital Ocean drama on my HN homepage at all times.

dgdkfjghkdfhkhg• 13 years ago

Never heard on DO but will use them for a project soon - looks great

debian33• 13 years ago

Indeed, never though a $5 provider would go that far for a noob on their network. Looks like their monitoring system is good too, took them only a couple of minute to take him down, which is good.

txutxu• 13 years ago

OK, after read the two blog posts, and all the comments here, this is my tough:

I've a poor's men backup solution too, from my personal droplet to gmail.

I use it for backup /etc, /root, /usr/local/(s)bin and /html, with excludes and rotations (about 15MB total), encrypted 4 passes with 4 different algorithms.

I did write two scripts, one for backup-restore (and encrypt/decrypt, secure deletion, html email generation, etc) and other to list-retrieve remote backups using IMAP.

On gmail I did put a filter to send all to the trash, so I get 30 days backup rotation. More complex rotations could be implemented using different cron tasks, with different config files, pointing to different accounts (srv-month-number@...), but for my personal VPS I don't need that, 30 days is enough.

But.

Now, I go to the digital ocean panel, to the "backups" tab, and I read:

   "Pricing is set at 20% of the Droplet's monthly cost (e.g. It will cost $1/mo. to enable backups for a 512MB Droplet)."

And I can only think: facepalm.

It's not only the price of the implementation time, that me and this other person with ruby/dropbox have spend...

Even if it looks like "you get a gratis backup solution", really it may be more expensive (because of all the network bandwitch)

Well, at a side of the fun of implementing your own backup/restore scripts, you get:

* provider independence (if all DO is down, you still can restore from gmail or dropbox)

* no periodical costs (but remember the implementation cost maybe bigger the first time, then is just reuse and edit a few variables).

* Security (you control how and where the data goes, otherwise you can save and restore from the provider, but implementation, management, internal policy, budget, team or technology changes, etc around your data is up to you).

But, I will never call again my solution a "poor's man" solution, because counting implementation time and network traffic, is much more expensive than $12/YEAR.

Edit: formatting a list.

Stop Using Digital Ocean Now: The Aftermath

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