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NeuStar confirmed that some of its UltraDNS managed DNS service customers were knocked offline for several hours Tuesday morning by a distributed denial of service attack.
"Early this morning, our monitoring systems detected a significant denial of service attack, which affected a small subset of our customers, in some cases for as long as a few hours," the Reston, Va. company said in a statement. "While we continue to investigate the cause, the extent, and the duration of the attack, service was completely restored by 10 a.m. EST."
NeuStar is a leading provider of high-availability DNS services to e-retailers including J.Jill and Diamond.com as well as high-tech companies such as Oracle and Juniper.
Competitor Dynamic Network Services blogged about the UltraDNS outage earlier today, asserting that it affected Amazon.com, SalesForce.com, advertising.com and Petco.com.
"We saw some funkiness starting over in Europe, and we were seeing that resolution for Amazon.com was failing," says Dynamic Network Services CEO Jeremy Hitchcock. "It looks like a pretty large outage that was affecting UltraDNS customers. It started this morning around 8 a.m, and for a two-hour period traffic was very significantly affected. Now it looks like things have settled down."
Hitchcock said his company’s Dynect Platform monitoring system saw heavy packet loss on UltraDNS name servers, with as much as 50% to 70% of responses being dropped.
"It’s a pretty significant event to have that kind of wide-scale disruption," Hitchcock added.
NeuStar is a leading provider of Internet infrastructure services. In addition to providing its UltraDNS suite of managed DNS services, NeuStar is the registry for the .biz and .us domains, and it provides telephone number look-up services for carriers in North America.
NeuStar has been a leader in the push to deploy security extensions to the DNS infrastructure through an emerging standard dubbed DNSSEC.
However, DNSSEC doesn’t address the problem of denial of service attacks. Instead, DNSSEC prevents hackers from hijacking Web traffic and redirecting it to bogus sites. Denial of service attacks, on the other hand, occur when a hacker disables a Web site by flooding it with bogus requests usually sent from a bot network.
Comments (14)
Not the first timeBy Anonymous on March 31, 2009, 7:53 pmThis is becoming an ongoing problem with Neustar as we have been clients with them for several years. We must be the ones that always seem to fall into the "small...
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Hmmmm...By Anonymous on April 1, 2009, 10:17 amThanks for that "anonymous" insight Tom Daly...
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Neustar -its bound to happen again....By Anonymous on April 1, 2009, 11:27 amI'm a firm believer that -What goes around -comes around...that place is all talk and no jelly...maybe they will finally lower their price considering they are just...
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NeuStar and ConfickerBy Anonymous on April 1, 2009, 12:21 pmTime zones considered, the timing of the NeuStar attack would have been just about the same as the start of April 1 when one crosses the international date line....
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dns serversBy Anonymous on April 1, 2009, 4:27 pmI think it will happen again Until IPV6 is setup and used,we are going to have attacks and problems my 2 cents jeff walker phd - las vegas - sin city
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Preventing DNS attacks as well as Preventing Critical InfrastrucBy BobP on April 1, 2009, 5:17 pmWe evaluated the Shield against two data sets: (a) the DARPA'98 data, and (b) over 30 onths of Beta test data generated using the DtX TESTBED network on a 24X7X365...
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