Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Network Security

DNSimple Suffers Downtime Due to 25 Gbps DDoS Attack

A major distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was launched on Cyber Monday against a customer of Florida-based DNS provider DNSimple. The attack lasted approximately 12 hours and caused outages to both the company and its customers.

A major distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was launched on Cyber Monday against a customer of Florida-based DNS provider DNSimple. The attack lasted approximately 12 hours and caused outages to both the company and its customers.

According to Anthony Eden, the founder of DNSimple, the attack peaked at 25 Gbps and 50 million PPS. This wasn’t the first time the company was hit by a DDoS attack and four protection devices had already been in place, but they couldn’t handle the large traffic volume.

The response team installed a fifth, larger capacity mitigation device, but it didn’t work properly because there wasn’t enough time to configure it properly, and the large amount of traffic that passed through it caused the name server software to crash.

Eden pointed out that the attack wasn’t aimed at his company, but at a new customer whose domains were already under fire.

The customer had already tried at least 2 other providers before DNSimple. Once the domains were delegated to us, we began receiving the traffic from the DDoS,” Eden said in a blog post. “DNSimple was not the target of the attack, nor were any of our other customers.”

Following the attack, the DNS provider has decided to take some measures to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future. DNSimple says it doesn’t have the resources to build a complete DDoS solution internally, but it has signed a contract with a third-party service provider.

The company also plans on allowing customers to have secondary name servers so that their websites can continue to operate in case of an attack. Another planned measure is the segmentation of customers into different networks to ensure that only a subset of users are affected in case of a DDoS attack against one user.

A report released by Verisign last month shows that the number of DDoS attacks exceeding 10 Gbps increased by 38% in the third quarter of 2014 compared to the previous quarter. A recent study from Incapsula shows that DDoS attacks cost companies $40,000 per hour.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

There are several DDoS mitigation products on the market, including a hybrid solution that was announced in November by Radware.

A hybrid attack mitigation service guarantees that traffic is diverted to the scrubbing center only when the enterprise’s Internet pipe is about to saturate. It clears attack traffic before it reaches the company’s Internet pipe, protecting against downtime and service degradation,” the company said. 

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Identity & Access

Zero trust is not a replacement for identity and access management (IAM), but is the extension of IAM principles from people to everyone and...

Cybersecurity Funding

Network security provider Corsa Security last week announced that it has raised $10 million from Roadmap Capital. To date, the company has raised $50...

Network Security

Attack surface management is nothing short of a complete methodology for providing effective cybersecurity. It doesn’t seek to protect everything, but concentrates on areas...

Application Security

Virtualization technology giant VMware on Tuesday shipped urgent updates to fix a trio of security problems in multiple software products, including a virtual machine...

Identity & Access

Hackers rarely hack in anymore. They log in using stolen, weak, default, or otherwise compromised credentials. That’s why it’s so critical to break the...

Application Security

Fortinet on Monday issued an emergency patch to cover a severe vulnerability in its FortiOS SSL-VPN product, warning that hackers have already exploited the...

Cyberwarfare

Websites of German airports, administration bodies and banks were hit by DDoS attacks attributed to Russian hacker group Killnet

Network Security

A zero-day vulnerability named HTTP/2 Rapid Reset has been exploited to launch some of the largest DDoS attacks in history.