Thousands of companies’ websites have been hit as a
result of denial of service (DoS) attacks on their domain name
registrar.
The Domain Name System (DNS) servers of two registrars have been
targeted in the last few days.
The DNS servers of Network Solutions were hit by a DoS attack
yesterday, resulting in performance degradation of customers’
websites.
Network Solutions now says it has overcome the problem and the
service to its customers is back to normal.
In addition, last weekend, Joker.com was hit with a similar DoS
attack which affected its customers. Joker said the attack was
“massive”, and that it was “working hard” to tackle the
problem.
Internet performance monitoring company Netcraft says over
550,000 domains are registered with German-based Joker. “Any of
those domains that use Joker's DNS servers are likely to be
affected,” said Netcraft.
DNS servers are used to look up and translate a company’s domain
name in plain text and then convert it to a numeric Internet
Protocol (IP) address, to enable surfers to connect to the
site.