With the recent news about DDoS Attacks on a bunch of grids, we have also had several clients whom have been attacked. This has motivated us to share how we were able to tame the situation within about 48 hours. This is still an evolving solution as we need to make sure we keep our customers grids and regions online.

Now to explain the above image, I am going to be breaking it down in the sections that are listed in the image from left to right.

User: This is you, the attacker, or whomever is trying to access the grid, simulator, assets, etc.

Cloud DNS Routing: We pay extra for our DNS to be hosted in the cloud, that allows us to scan for attacks at the first level before you even hit a server. This technology also provides checking against our servers verifying they are responding with 9 different locations for the quickest resolution time for looking up our latest dns records for routing purposes.

Routing Firewall: This is a tool we recently put in place as attacks were able to make it through by bypassing DNS and going straight for our IP Addresses. This firewall detects all types of attacks, and then determines if traffic is legit or an attack. If an attack is detected that traffic is sent to the null server.

The Null Server is just a server that is a dead end, it just eats bad traffic and does nothing else.

Proxy Server: If an attack has made it this far, we have one final trick in our arsenal and that is our server with a 10Gbps connection to eat whatever has somehow gotten this far. Also from this point we can setup the server’s firewall to protect you from future attacks of known attackers. Also the proxy server doubles as a cache for assets and inventory for legitimate users giving them faster loading times on assets and inventory for commonly requested items.

Destination Servers: After going through this process in a matter of milliseconds, you will end up at your destination allowing you to make sure you have a connection that travels through all these layers of security to keep customer’s services online and functional.

I hope this process can provide insight to other grids out there and help provide a way for them to protect themselves from these attacks. Remember the largest way to protect yourself, is just to make sure not to feed into the attacks. There is no 100% attack that will ever be fully protected against, hackers will always find new ways to attack. The best course of action is to be proactive at always improving protection, while not antagonizing the attackers, this only fuels them to find new ways to cause issues.

With our development moving ahead with full steam it sadly leaves us mostly unable to attend to the needs of the ZetaWorlds residents. We realize this needs to change and that we have to take better care of ZetaWorlds as a community. For that purpose we have opened up an internship position which you can read more about here

We are already well into 2016, but up until this point we had not fully determined our plans for this year. After some consideration and running into a few brick walls our schedule appears to be mostly complete.

This year will bring a few major changes to the Zetamex customers and residents of ZetaWorlds. Our new and improved administration panel is still in heavy development and we will begin internal testing in a few weeks. Once completed a beta will be available to existing customers. Invites for this beta will be sent out shortly after completion of the alpha version with the aim to refine the beta version later available to all customers. Our goal is to fully complete this new panel by the end of this year. The reason for this long term testing phase is our aim to provide a lite version for everyone to use, not just Zetamex customers. The details of how we will provide this are still being determined.

ZetaWorlds is providing an ever improving experience for its residents and the number of hypergrid visitors is ever growing. We are very pleased so many decide to come around and see what we have to offer and as a result we want to give something back to all of those endorsing ZetaWorlds. Specifically, like some might have noticed already, we are planning to open up an Expo this year allowing any non-profit organization and grids to show off what they have to offer and encourage people to travel the metaverse. The details of this Expo are still being ironed out and we have yet to find a curator taking care of managing this year long event. It is probably worth mentioning here, that we are actively looking for curators for the Expo and that you can apply for this voluntary position by simply sending us an email. We hope this Expo will encourage the growth of opensim and its education and social capabilities.

Oh we are not done yet, don’t you worry. Another big goal this year is restructuring our product line and making it much easier to get exactly what you need. This will include a completely new way of ordering services, with advanced customization to tailor opensim exactly the way you want it be. We want to move away from standard packages and give the customer the flexibility opensim can provide. Especially for grid hosting this new ability to only pay for you need will reduce costs on both ends and allow for grids to grow easier than ever before. More details on this later, a bit of teasing shall be allowed.

Curiosity is human nature, so if you want to know more, feel free to send us a tweet or email or g+ message or a pigeon, but please don’t throw message stones through our windows, they are brand new.

Take care everyone.