Category: Infrastructure

We had a DDOS attack on RunSignUp today.  It lasted from about 4:00PM until 4:45PM when we were successful in cutting it off. It averaged over 1,000 requests per second. The attack was looking for vulnerabilities like SQL injection. This slowed down the…

We have been doing a lot of infrastructure improvements over the past couple of months as a part of our PCI Level 1 Certification.  That is the highest level and requires extra measures of auditing and security and scanning, including a week…

We updated our site with this security patch – https://blog.cloudflare.com/yet-another-padding-oracle-in-openssl-cbc-ciphersuites/. Other webmasters may want to run the free Qualys SSL scanning tool to check their grades – https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/index.html. Users can also check out their most common websites as well (proud to say RunSignUp beat…

UPDATE: We have made two changes to our system to try to improve this situation if it happens again. First, we have adjusted the settings on our New Relic Monitoring tool to try to catch this type of error so we can…

A couple of years ago Rich Friedman, Stephen Sigwart and I (Bob Bickel) spun off a technology company called RedLine13 from RunSignUp. We felt we had developed a couple of cool pieces of technology that a broader community would be interested in…

A security hole was reported in ImageMagic, a tool that many websites including RunSignUp use for image resizing and processing. We learned of this issue yesterday and have updated the site with fixes last night. We did not detect any breaches as a result of…

As part of our big infrastructure upgrade, we have improved our processes for database backups that are in addition to the AWS Aurora automated backups. The Aurora backups are good from a reliability point of view with features like enables point-in-time recovery. However, the…

We try to improve our infrastructure in Q1 of each year to make sure we do not build up technical debt and stay on top of the most current trends in technology. We have four goals when we look at this each…

There are a number of processes that run on a scheduled basis in a big system like RunSignup – these are called Chronjobs. They are typically run on one server in most environments, and that is how we did things until today….