Tag: loadbalancer.org

Simple Denial of Service DOS attack mitigation using HAProxy

Denial of Service (DOS) attacks can be especially effective against certain types of web application. If the application is highly dynamic or database intensive it can be remarkably simple to degrade or cripple the functionality of a site. This blog article describes some simple methods to mitigate single source IP DOS attacks using HAProxy. I’ve described how you would implement the techniques using the Loadbalancer.org appliance but they are easily transferable to any HAProxy based cluster

XML Converter for Version 6.21 loadbalancer.org appliance

I was tasked last week with creating a long awaited appliance XML updater for Version 6.21 of our appliance which until now has been a matter of offering an upgrade service free of charge to anyone running on Version 6.21 of the loadbalancer.org appliance wishing to upgrade to our latest Version 7.6.2 appliance. We have been telling you our highly valued users of our loadbalancer.org appliance that this could take some time to complete, this was to allow support time to do the conversions.

Another year, another IP Expo show

We’re dusting ourselves off after exhibiting at IPExpo 2014. A huge thank you to everyone who visited our stand during the two day event. There were some productive discussions, light-hearted fun, and we even talked about load balancing!!! We love the opportunity to get some face-to-face time and felt the show was so good we’ve already booked up for IPExpo 2015

The Poodle SSLv3

So here we go again! SSL is broken once more and this one now leaves us with no SSL Ciphers that we can reliably use in a live production site so I guess this now forces us to use the TLS suite of ciphers which in the past have also had problems. Lets put it this way – if you use any form of SSL ciphers your vulnerable! Qualys have again been quick to update the Qualys SSL Labs Test tool that they provide which is free to use. This will test your SSL Certificate and all the currently usable Ciphers for your site

Shell-shocked by shell shock? I give you “CMD Caret” ^&

There seems to have been so much hype over the recent bash bug, shell shock! And there were all the people  in the Microsoft world thinking YES we are so cool we are NOT affected by it! Yea right I knew it, there had to be something much the same as the bash bug available in CMD.exe It affects the Windows CMD.exe Shell and I will provide a working example of how it can be exploited. It does show the whole hype of the bash bug bearing in mind you need access to the machines shell in the first place

Shell-shocked by shell shock? Bash vulnerability explained.

Having recovered from the recent Heartbleed vulnerabilities we now have another headline grabbing vulnerability to keep us all busy. First let me say that our product should be perfectly safe and secure unless you’ve already shared your passwords or forgotten to run “lbsecure”

Windows NLB (WNLB) and its disadvantages

Whilst Windows Network Load Balancing (WNLB) has been constantly improved in each version of Windows since it’s introduction in Windows 2000, it still has a fairly extensive list of disadvantages when compared to a hardware or virtual based loadbalancer.

Source IP Addresses, STunnel, Haproxy and Server Logs

When using proxies such as STunnel and HAProxy it’s easy to loose track of the client source IP address. This occurs for example when HAProxy is used in it’s default configuration to load balance a number of back-end web servers. By default, the source IP address of the packet reaching the web servers is the IP address of the load balancer and not the IP address of the client

Heartbleed 2.0? Not exactly but more OpenSSL issues have been found

In the wake of the recent Heartbleed Bug another series of OpenSSL vulnerabilities have been found. Whilst the Heartbleed bug was relatively easy to exploit, the latest batch of bugs are not. However if successfully exploited, there is potential for eavesdropping and traffic manipulation (CVE-2014-0224) as well as running arbitrary code on the vulnerable client or server (CVE-2014-0195)