December 4, 2006 - Beginning on the Monday after Thanksgiving, also known as Cyber Monday, CrystalTech, a full-service hosting company, was hit by a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The attack targeted CrystalTech's Domain Name Service (DNS) servers and distrupted service for approximately four hours.
The DDoS attack was delivered from more than 5,000 computers that simultaneously sent hundreds of thousands of requests to the company's DNS servers. The Domain Name Service servers translate user-friendly names like www.crystaltech.com into numeric addresses used by the Internet. The huge amount of data could not be processed and the DNS servers quickly became flooded and unusable.
"This was not just a simple DDoS. We get those all the time and no one sees it, since our team and equipment handle it very well. This was a very well planned and professional DNS DDoS." -- Bob Cichon, president and COO of CrystalTech. The DNS servers remained unusable for four hours and, during this time, all websites hosted by CrystalTech were offline.
During the outage, CrystalTech tried to keep its clients informed in order to defuse their frustration regarding the downtime. The company's President and Chief Operating Officer, Bob Cichon, posted all the updates on CristalTech's customer support forums. He was helped by a few members of the staff, responding to almost all of the inquiries coming from customers.
Source: Netcraft
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Secure64® is a software developer providing highly secure DNS and server applications with built-in denial-of-service protection features to help ensure your Internet-dependent business is always accessible. Based on the genuinely secure SourceT® microOS, Secure64 DNS remains highly available during network attacks and is immune to compromise from rootkits and malware.