Panos Ipeirotis, a computer scientists working at New York University,attack on his Amazon web service using
Google Spreadsheets and Panos Ipeirotis checked his Amazon Web Services bill last week - its was $1,177.76 !
He had accidentally invented a brand
new type of internet attack, thanks to an idiosyncrasy in the online
spreadsheets Google runs on its Google Docs service, and he had
inadvertently trained this attack on himself. He calls it a Denial of
Money attack, and he says others could be susceptible too.
On his personal blog Ipeirotis explained
that it all started when he saw that Amazon Web Services was charging
him with ten times the usual amount because of large amounts of outgoing
traffic.
As part of an experiment in how
to use crowdsourcing to generate descriptions of images, he had posted
thumbnails of 25,000 pictures into a Google document, and then he
invited people to describe the images. The problem was that these
thumbnails linked back to original images stored on Amazon’s S3 storage
service, and apparently, Google’s servers went slightly bonkers. “Google just very aggressively grabbed the images from Amazon again and again and again,” he says.
After analyzing traffic logs he
was able to determine that every hour a total of 250 gigabytes of
traffic was sent out because of Google’s Feedfetcher, the mechanism that
allows the search engine to grab RSS or Atom feeds when users add them
to Reader or the main page.
After speaking with Google
representatives, Ipeirotis believes that the company is trying to
balance user privacy with a desire to present fresh content. It seems
that Google doesn’t want to store the information on its own servers so
it uses Feedfetcher to retrieve it every time, thus generating large
amounts of traffic.
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