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<h1 style="margin: 0pt;"><img alt="GreenNet"
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<p align="right"><font color="#666666"
face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"
size="2"><font color="#000000">4 October
2013</font></font><strong><font
color="#666666" face="Arial,
Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><br>
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<td colspan="2"><br>
Dear GreenNet friends <br>
<br>
We would like to update you on the GreenNet
service outage at the beginning of August,
and some of the things we are doing about
it.<br>
<br>
The initial cause was a powerful
“distributed denial of service” attack
(DDoS) intended to silence a particular
journalistic website that we host. For most
of 1 August, the attack also took down our
upstream provider, who supplies us with the
connections between our server and other
internet networks. The suppliers isolated
our systems to protect theirs for the
following four days, which prolonged the
outage and disruption, although during part
of that time we were able to keep an
emergency email service running elsewhere.<br>
<br>
Unfortunately, all providers in this field
are commercial companies and subject to
commercial pressures, although our main
supplier has since improved their resilience
to this type of “UDP reflection” attack.
However, now that we have a more complete
picture of the crisis we can see that it is
not acceptable to continue relying on
services provided by a single company that
will sacrifice our networks and thousands of
users to protect their commercial interests.<br>
<br>
Once our services were restored and the
precise DDoS target website had been
isolated on a server elsewhere, we managed
to keep that website mostly online despite
the assault continuing for over a month. We
have achieved this without any adverse
effects on the rest of our network. Although
we now have good intelligence on the
originators of the attack, the international
nature of such cyber-crime makes it almost
impossible for any formal identification or
prosecution to be successful. The owner of
the target site does not yet want it
identified but it is likely to be revealed
in time.<br>
<br>
Clearly service reliability is at the heart
of what we do. We are keenly aware that you
depend on it for the work that you do.
Balancing our users' needs for
confidentiality and data protection, and for
uninterrupted web and email access, is
fundamental to GreenNet's purpose and ethos.
We are completely committed to maintaining
email, web and internet services that are
reliable and professional as well as secure
and independent.<br>
<br>
Despite all the grief that was inflicted on
and borne by our users, the messages of
support and sympathy that we received were
massive and overwhelming. What a wonderful
community we are part of! Rather than users
leaving in droves, the mutuality of feeling
and purpose that was demonstrated has given
us even more strength to continue in our
work. Offers of assistance have been very
gratefully received, resulting in very
positive developments for a significant
improvement in services.<br>
<br>
We are now engaged in a programme of
technical improvements to strengthen our
systems' protection against any further
potential attacks. The next stage is for a
completely new hosting facility with
enhanced levels of DDoS protection and
increased upstream bandwidth, together with
a 100% renewable energy supply, which until
now has been difficult to obtain in the
central London area. This stage, although
involving considerable work, will be in
place before the Autumn is out. The move
will involve a few hours of service
disruption over one night, although we will
of course strive to minimise this. Once we
have a date for this maintenance, most
likely near the end of October, we will send
another message on this email list with
further details. The vast majority of people
using GreenNet email and web services need
make no changes to their settings. There
will be a a change of IP address for our
servers, about which we will notify the few
people likely to be affected nearer the
time.<br>
<br>
We are also working to improve redundancy in
our systems without undue cost, so that we
are not dependent on a single possible point
of failure, and will be working with other
human rights and free-expression
organisations to defend content that may be
attacked in a way that does not compromise
reliability to others. We also realise that
during the crisis our communications to you,
the people who depend on us, was sporadic
and will particularly be looking at ways of
improving this in our contingency planning.<br>
<br>
We value all comments from GreenNet members,
negative or positive, so please do inform us
of any problems you experience or
suggestions for improvement.<br>
<br>
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<td colspan="2">With all best wishes<br>
<br>
Andrew, Anna, Cedric, Howard, Ian, Liz,
Marek, Michael and Sarah<br>
<br>
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<h3><font si="" color="white" face="Arial, Helvetica,
sans-serif">GreenNet is the ethical Internet Service
Provider that has been connecting people and groups who
work for peace, the environment, gender equality and
human rights since 1986.</font></h3>
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<p><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"
size="-1">We hope that you are happy to receive our
newsletter. If not, <a
href="http://mailman.greennet.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/greennet-l">unsubscribe
here</a> and you will not receive it in future.</font></p>
<p><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"
size="-1">GreenNet, Development House, 56-64 Leonard
Street, London EC2A 4LT.<br>
Tel (UK): 0845 055 4011 Tel (int'l): +44 (0)20 7065 0935<br>
Fax: +44 (0)20 7253 2658. Email: <a
href="mailto:info@gn.apc.org" style="color: rgb(255,
255, 255);">info+n@gn.apc.org</a></font></p>
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