Archive for March 27th, 2007
Attack on root server and internet traffic
The attack, which began Tuesday at about 5:30 a.m. Eastern time, was the most significant attack against the root servers since an October 2002 distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, said Ben Petro, senior vice president of services with Internet service provider Neustar. Root servers manage the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS), used to translate Web addresses such as Amazon.com into the numerical IP addresses used by machines.
“Two of the root servers suffered badly, although they did not completely crash; some of the others also saw heavy traffic,” said John Crain, chief technical officer with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), in an e-mail interview
The two hardest-hit servers are maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense and ICANN, he added.
The botnet briefly overwhelmed these servers with useless requests, causing them to occasionally hang, but did not disrupt Internet service, Petro said. By 10:30 a.m., Internet service providers were able to filter enough of the traffic from the botnet machines that traffic to and from the root servers was essentially back to normal.
The attack wasn’t that strong and they managed to filter it out, it was in terms of MB rather than GB frequently seen in modern DDoS attacks.
This is the heavy attack and the most significant in the past 5 years or so.
The every biggest attack in root servers is on 21st Oct 2002 full report of that is available here.
