June is security awareness month at NewPath Consulting. Last week's blog post set the stage for what your business should be asking yourself and cloud vendors you work with. This week we feature Typepad, one of our blogging and content management systems of choice.
The following conversation was held by email with Typepad's helpful and friendly support staff. They have recently handled a repeated distributed denial of service attack admirably, and they are one of our vendors who have publicly discussed their response to the attacks.
NPC: What are the services that get impacted when Typepad gets a DDoS attack?
Typepad: Without going into too much detail, a DDOS generally impacts ability to receive traffic from upstream partners by clogging their network, or clogging the network between providers. Typepad services are generally just fine behind the DDOS, but the network in front of them is keeping traffic from getting to us.
How does Typepad keep customers updated about the resolution to security issues?
While any system-wide issues are ongoing, we try to keep people updated as frequently as makes sense (at least hourly) via Twitter, Facebook, and the status site – http://status.typepad.com/ – in addition to replying to individuals who have reached out to us via email or by opening a help ticket. Even if service is unavailable, the team continues to communicate with the Typepad community. After any significant downtime, we also post additional details on Everything Typepad – http://everything.typepad.com/ – once everything is resolved.
How long does it usually take to get the service back to normal?
It varies greatly based on the size of the attack. Our goal is to minimize the impact as much as possible.
Is client data safe? Should Customers make a local backup regularly? How?
DDOS attacks are not attacks to compromise data but to prevent access to a service. Typepad is keeping your data safe during these attacks.
Typepad goes to great lengths to keep your information secure and has backups available just in case. If you do wish to keep your own backups, you can do that too by downloading an export file at Settings > Import/Export (http://help.typepad.com/import_export.html). We can also provide anyone with a back up of all uploaded files (images, documents, etc.) anytime – just open a help ticket with the request.
Who are some of the biggest brands who trust your service?
Some of our customers are featured in the Showcase section on the front of our site. Beyond that, we leave it up to our customers to disclose if they are using our service or not. We can say that Typepad hosts some very large sites.
