I received an email from a reader of TheDomains.com a few hours ago that there domains that were registered with NetworkSolutions.com were not resolving and now According to NetworkSolutions.com blog, the company confirms they have been undergoing an Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for the past two days:
“”Network Solutions experienced a distributed denial of service attack Monday afternoon, June 20, 2011 and again on Tuesday morning, June 21, 2011. Our engineers worked quickly to mitigate the attacks and services are in the process of being restored. We continue to monitor this situation, as potential risk still exists for these attacks to recur.
We regret the inconvenience and thank the customers and community for helping spread the word. While we do continually take measures to prevent these and other types of issues, unfortunately circumstances like this are beyond our control.””
As of today “Customers are still reporting issues with access to web and email services. ”
“We appreciate your patience. The nature of a DDoS puts the root cause beyond our control. We have excellent systems and personnel in place to mitigate these issues and are working hard to monitor and mitigate ongoing traffic volumes. To our customers we apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience. If you are seeing access or connectivity issues please be assured we are aware and working on the issue and it is not necessary to open a help desk ticket”
One of my domains and servers got hit a few months back with 60K hits per second for 12+ hours coming from over 4,000 infected servers – mostly in China, Russia and undeveloped parts of the world. Statistics show most DDOS attacks originate from some loser the USA – very dfficult to find origin.
The better DDOS mitigators will not resolve the domain the first time – but it will resolve if the user hits refresh or keys the domain in again. My PPC productivity drops about 20% during an attack = meaning 80% of the time the user hits the refresh button.
Law enforcement has a pretty robust network when it comes to traffickers in child pornography, international money laundering, etc. Save for a few very backwater places, they can reach the offenders, most of the time, no matter where they are.
We really need to start applying this same principle to coordinated attacks against digital infrastructure and employing stiff prison sentences against the offenders. Start rooting them out and locking them up on a regular basis for long period of time, it will diminish. It won’t ever stop entirely, but it can be drastically reduced by aggressively going after the small handful of turds that perpetrate this sort of thing. Instead of it being “very unlikely that anything is done”, lets make it a coinflip. 50% of the time, they get lucky and get away with it. The other 50%, they get caught. Attacks will go down to virtually nothing.
Yes, it’s true that it can be ‘hard to trace’ the origins of ddos attacks since the perpetrators are going to be quite savvy with minding their footprints, but its most not impossible, nor even improbable. With law enforcement powers in tow, you can unweave the web to find out where anything originated from, then walk it back from there, straight to their moms basement.
It’s time the laws caught up with the digital era and started seeing some of these clowns off to prison. If the US is going to be a signatory to anything related to the “global internet”, it should first demand that meaningful international coordination occur, on the matter of digital attacks. If we’re giving your country any kind of”foreign aid”, then we expect you to prosecute your domestic criminals who attack our digital interests when we report them to you.