Power outage and DDoS attack at the same time? No problem.

Last week, on Wednesday the 26^th of October, at 10 PM, a planned power outage occurred here in Härryda Municipality outside of Gothenburg, where the Ports Group headquarters is located.

As for power outages in general, we don’t need to take any precautionary actions because power outages (planned or unplanned) are automatically taken care of by our UPS (UPS stands for uninterruptible power supply, an electrical apparatus that provides emergency power when the input power source fails) and our diesel generator.

A planned power outage however, is a perfect opportunity to analyze the UPS and diesel generator operating in a real-life situation. So together with our operating partners Enaco we were at location when it happened.

In order to simulate a real, unplanned power outage, we had therefore not started the diesel generator or made any other preparations.

Almost exactly when power was lost (at 22 seconds past 10 PM), our server environment was the target for the following DDoS attack:
7,5 Gbps (7.5 times our bandwidth) and 669 500 packets per second (threshold value for our mitigation is 60 000 packets per second).

This attack, however, affected nothing because it was mitigated by our operating partners Tele2 and Arbour.

Operationally, all hardware and servers were running smoothly, no alarms in our monitoring systems and normal traffic in the firewall.

So no interruptions for our clients despite the worst possible conditions, just as it should be!