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DNS Root Servers Attacked

Posted by kdawson on from the flexing-muscles dept.

liquidat and others wrote in with the news that the DNS Root Servers were attacked overnight. It looks like the F, I, and M servers felt the attack and recovered, whereas G (US Department of Defense) and L (ICANN) did less well. Some new botnet flexing its muscle perhaps? AP coverage is here.

3 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. That's a pretty bold accusation by Flavio · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You suggest that the Department of Defense's nameserver is badly managed, making an argument by analogy concerning "large governmental organizations". Since you haven't provided a technical argument, your accusation has no merit. Your "distinct impression" is pure speculation.

    But congratulations on getting everyone riled up.

  2. Re:so a lot of it was from South Korea.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    South Korea has :
    1. Almost a 100% windows monoculture (really), because they standardised on an ActiveX control for secure banking etc before SSL was standardised, and everything still needs it
    2. Dirt cheap, fast broadband
    3. Fairly rampant piracy, hence many unpatched machines
    Put it together and you get botnet paradise.
  3. Re:130+ root servers by Rufus211 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sorry to burst your conspiracy theory, but data mining the root name servers would be next to useless. These are the Root name servers and as such all they know about are TLD (top level domains). You ask one of the roots "who is in charge of .com" or .edu or .uk, and they respond. The only data you could ever get from them is distribution among TLDs. Now add caching name servers into the equation (99.999999% of boxes on the internet are behind one) and the statistics becomes even more useless. The records returned by the roots have a lifetime of 2 days. This means it doesn't matter if there's 1 client or 1 million clients behind a particular caching name server, it's only going to ask about .com every 2 days.

    >We really need to move to a more formalized structure that reinforces the long-term continuation of the good system we have today.
    And who's going to run that formalized structure? Hrm, maybe some "good individuals and organizations" would be willing to do it?