A global attack on the DNS (domain name system) caused
disruptions affecting customers of internet hosting company Akamai
Technologies, including search engine sites.
Akamai disputed early reports that the disruption in service to
the sites, including Yahoo.com, Google.com and Microsoft.com, was
specific to its network of DNS servers, which translate
user-friendly domain names into numeric IP (Internet Protocol)
addresses.
Instead, the problem on Akamai's network was part of a "large
scale international attack on the internet infrastructure", said
Jeff Young, an Akamai spokesman.
The attack affected Akamai's internet name service and a "small
number" of the company's customers, primarily search engines which
use Akamai to manage traffic to their websites.
"There was an intermittent service issue. It was not an outage
on the Akamai network. The name service continued to operate
throughout the incident," Young said.
"We have no information that leads us to believe the attack was
directed specifically at Akamai," he added.
Systems at web performance monitoring company Keynote Systems
noted a decrease in performance at leading websites and said that a
number of sites, including those for Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and
Symantec were only at 20% capacity.
Traffic to other companies on Keynote's Business 40 Internet
Performance Index, which includes the corporate websites of Cisco
Systems, 3Com and Charles Schwab were not slowed.
Akamai could not provide details about the nature of the attack,
where it came from or organisations other than its customers that
were affected. However, networks around the world experienced the
attack.
The interruptions at Akamai have the fingerprint of a
denial-of-service attack, in which hundreds or thousands of
machines work together to flood a specific internet address or
addresses with malicious traffic, slowing it down.
In contrast, service is typically restored quickly after
hardware or software failures, once the cause of the failure is
determined.
In the meantime, most of the affected customers have switched and
are using their own DNS servers or those hosted by other companies,
Taylor said.
However, the Akamai DNS service appeared to be up and running,
and Google was still using it to resolve requests to their
site.
Paul Roberts writes for IDG News Service