[asterisk-users] Being attacked by an Amazon EC2 ...

[Fred Posner]

On Apr 13, 2010, at 4:22 PM, Randy R wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 8:25 PM, Steve Murphy <murf at parsetree.com> wrote:
>> Hmmm. It would seem that it would be to Amazon's advantage to jump on this
>> problem,
> 
> I am pushing for this, please everyone who is suffering from this
> problem, submit it or write to complain to Amazon and post the message
> publicly wherever you can in a civilized, even lucid message to them.
> If you do it they will take notice. They need to see this as a problem
> in their space and take reasonable steps to either make it harder to
> abuse their service and/or easier to report the abuse, which they must
> then act upon.  The thread here is an interesting discussion, but it
> can't compare to actual action they might take if your complaints
> reach them. They will need to act, but only if you force them to take
> notice.
> 
> I believe Amazon has a chance to distinguish themselves from ISP who
> allow spammers to do mass mailings without any real challenge. They
> will act if you continue putting the message out there.
> 
> /r
> 

The only person I've gotten to respond to me is Kay Kinton from Amazon's Public Relations. Although she responded, she will not take a phone call or discuss the issue over the phone. She gave me two statements so far, which I will be posting on VoIPTechChat.com (one's there already).

Statement 1:

Hello Fred and thank you for contacting us.  Over the weekend, we received a report of a suspicious account and began an investigation.  Our normal process is to connect the two involved parties to give them an opportunity to talk in case the abuse is not malicious but is simply heavy traffic from a legitimate customer.  If that is not successful, we then move to isolate the traffic from the abusing party.  Normally this process works quite well for situations our customers have encountered, however this incident has highlighted the need for an escalation process to address potentially malicious attacks more quickly. Additionally, we are working on quickly putting better protections and processes in place to better guard against unwanted SIP traffic.  We take the security of our customers and our quality of service very seriously, and will  continue to work to improve our processes and services for customers.

/end statement 1

This was of course was while attacks were continuing so I asked for a discussion and sent her several questions when she told me "what else can I tell you."

Today I received statement 2:

Hello Fred. We believe that we've identified and shut down the illegal activity and are closing the loop with customers.  We'd certainly be interested in hearing of the cases you refer to below so we can follow up.

/end statement 2.

So.. since she's interested... please let her know how they did not respond to your complaints, the attacks, and well, any of the concerns you have to which she should follow up:

Kay Kinton
kinton at amazon.com
Public Relations Manager
Amazon Web Services
Phone:  206-266-8387

---fred
http://qxork.com