Heroku Outage Analysis

October 15, 2015

I'm in the process of writing a security report on Heroku. I was interested to know the number of times that attacks on the service caused downtime. I wrote a script to collect all of the 815 incidents and then checked each report against the following expression: /hack|attack|ddos|malicious|virus|vunerability|breach/.

This returned the following incidents: 156, 157, 245, 308, 489, 539, 665, 709, 738.

Discarding false positives gave this list:

  • 156, DDoS, 27 hours, May 2011
  • 157, DDoS, 1 hour, May 2011
  • 245, DDoS, 4 hours, Dec 2011

In summary, all attacks that resulted in a service outage were caused by DDoS attacks, and all of these were in 2011.

The data can be downloaded here.