Friday, May 22, 2009

DNS Attack Downs Internet in Parts of China

Owen Fletcher writes on PC World:

An attack on the servers of a domain registrar in China caused an online video application to cripple Internet access in parts of the country late on Wednesday.

Internet access was affected in five northern and coastal provinces after the DNS (domain name system) attack, which targeted just one company but caused unanswered information requests to flood China's telecommunications networks, China's IT ministry said in a statement on its Web site. The DNS is what computers use to find each other on the Internet.

The incident revealed holes in China's DNS that are "very strange" for such a big country, said Konstantin Sapronov, head of Kaspersky's Virus Lab in China.

The problems started when registrar DNSPod's DNS servers were targeted with a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack, described by the company in an online statement. In such an attack, the attacker orders a legion of compromised computers to try to communicate with a server all at once, which overwhelms the server and crushes its ability to return requests for information.

More here.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home