Network Solutions Takes Hit From DDoS Attack

Network Solutions says it has bounced back from a distributed denial-of-service attack that took down some of the websites it hosts for hours.

“The recent DDOS attack affecting some customers has now been mitigated,” the company posted on Facebook Wednesday. “Customer websites should be resolving normally, and you should be able to readily access the Network Solutions site. If you continue to have issues, please contact our Customer Service team at 1-866-391-4357.”

“Thanks to everyone for their patience as we resolved this issue,” the company added.

About three hours prior to that post,  Network Solutions – which is owned by Web.com and offers services ranging from hosting services to SSL certificates and domain name registration – acknowledged in a separate Facebook post that a DDoS attack was impacting its customers. Earlier in the week, Network Solutions also warned customers that some customer sites had been compromised. 

A study released Wednesday by DDoS prevention firm Prolexic Technologies reported that the average packet-per-second rate of DDoS attacks during the second quarter of 2013 reached 47.4 Mpps, while the average bandwidth of attacks hit 49.24 Gbps. Those numbers represent an increase of 1,655 percent and 925 percent, respectively, compared to the same period last year.

“This quarter we logged increases for all major DDoS attack metrics, and some have been significant. DDoS attacks are getting bigger, stronger and longer,” said Stuart Scholly, president at Prolexic, in a statement. “We believe this growth is being fueled by the increasing prevalence of compromised Joomla and WordPress web servers in increasingly large botnets.”

“Attack durations are likely increasing because perpetrators are less concerned about detection and protecting their botnets,” Scholly added. “The widespread availability of compromised web servers makes it much easier for malicious actors to replenish, grow and redeploy botnets. Traditionally, botnets have been built from compromised clients. This requires malware distribution via PCs and virus infections, and takes considerable time and effort. Consequently, attackers wanted to protect their client-based botnets and were more fearful of detection, so we saw shorter attack durations.”