[ISN] DDoS attack hobbles major sites, including Amazon

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10421577-265.html

By Tom Krazit
Relevant Results
CNet News
December 23, 2009

An attack directed at the DNS provider for some of the Internet's larger 
e-commerce companies -- including Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Expedia -- took 
several Internet shopping sites offline Wednesday evening, two days 
before Christmas.

Neustar, the company that provides DNS services under the UltraDNS brand 
name, confirmed an attack took place Wednesday afternoon, taking out 
sites or rendering them extremely sluggish for about an hour. A 
representative who answered the customer support line said the attacks 
were directed against Neustar facilities in Palo Alto and San Jose, 
Calif., and Allen Goldberg, vice president of corporate communications 
for Neustar, confirmed that at about 4:45 p.m. PST, "our alarms went 
off."

Goldberg said the company received a disproportionately high number of 
queries coming into the system, and analyzed it as an attack. Neustar 
deployed "a mitigation response" within minutes of the attack, he said, 
and brought matters under control within an hour. The response limited 
the problems to Northern California, he said.

In addition to the high-profile sites, dozens of smaller sites that rely 
upon Amazon for Web-hosting services were also taken down by the attack. 
Amazon's S3 and EC2 services were affected by the problems, according to 
Jeff Barr, Amazon's lead Web Evangelist, who retweeted a report to that 
effect without clarification and confirmed it in later tweets.

[...]


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