 |
DreamHost Goes Offline With Packet FloodHosting and Email Outage Repaired by Network TeamApril 8, 2007 - DreamHost nameservers have been hit by a severe Denial of Service (DoS) outage. DreamHost is a major web-hosting company with thousands of clients worldwide. Websites hosted by the company could not be reached for several hours and the email service was unavailable for the duration of the attack. At first, DreamHost noticed some intermittent DNS server outages on all of its nameservers. The company's technical staff believed that a recently-installed DNS load balancers was the cause of the outages. Only after approximately 2 hours did the staff realize that the web hosting company was in fact under a massive Easter DoS attack. The powerful attack sent millions of packets to the company's DNS servers, blocking legitimate traffic with huge amounts of data. An hosting adminitrator was quickly dispatched to the data center where a network engineer was already working to stop the attack. After almost an hour and a half the staff managed to restore full functionality to the affected DNS servers and began working to bring the whole network to full capacity. Because of the downtime caused by cyber criminals, some DreamHost clients changed to other hosting companies. The clients who remained with the company were upset with DreamHost's poor communication during the attack. The company was slow to respond with an answer as to why their DNS servers failed and what security measures were being taken to mitigate the attack. These new laws are intended to make hackers think twice before committing a DoS attack. They now know that their act is a criminal one and will be pursued according to criminal laws. Any DoS attacker can face up to 10 years in prison, so it is hoped that the number of attacks will decrease as a result of these new laws against cyber crime. Source: DreamHost About Secure64 Software Corporation
|
|
|