Root Servers under attack

According to this report, nine of the 13 Root Servers came under sustained DoS attack last Monday. Details are sketchy, for obvious reasons. Here is the Washington Post account, which claims that all 13 servers were attacked and that there was more than one attack. The Register has the most detailed report. “In a distributed denial of service attack that began 5pm US Eastern time Monday and lasted one hour, seven of the 13 servers at the top of the internet’s domain name system hierarchy were rendered virtually inaccessible, sources told ComputerWire.”

“It was the largest and most complex DDoS attack on all 13 roots,” a source familiar with the attacks said. “Only four of the primary 13 root servers were up during the attack. Seven were completely down and two were suffering severe degradation.”

The source said each of the servers was hit by two to three times the load normally born by the entire 13-server constellation. Paul Vixie, chairman of the Internet Software Consortium, which manages one of the servers, said he saw 80Mbps of traffic to the box, which usually only handles 8Mbps.