Zerigo, one of the largest cloud DNS-hosters has suffered from distributed denial of service attack. The first official alert was issued on July 23 via Twitter: “Our a, b and http://d.ns.zerigo.net nameservers are currently under high load due to a DDOS attack. We are working to solve it”.
During that day http://www.zerigostatus.com/ website was updated on the process of setting junk traffic filters. By 18:45 UTC half of Zerigo customers from USA were able to access internet domain names properly. But still, 50% of US users and users from Europe were cut off the cloud based DNS system. “Our #1 priority is getting our customers back online.” – said the company in its evening update.
Today at 03:19 UTC Zerigo announced that DNS services are working normally. The company thanks Dallas and London ISPs for the assistance in filtering junk traffic.
But that’s not all folks. Domain names are not critical to the existence of the Internet, because all URLs we type turn into IP addresses. But imagine what would happen if we were deprived of simple addresses like google.com or nvd.nist.gov? We would have to memorize dozens of bogus numbers like 74.125.232.192 (that’s in fact is Google’s IP address). For most users it would turn into a real Internet blackout. For those who don’t want to rely on key DNS-hosters Naked Security.com highly recommends to add the key domain names to the Windows’ hosts file and save themselves from abuse of government discretion or random whim of Anonymous hactivists.
