Fergie's Tech Blog

Porn Site Feud Spawns New DNS Amplification Attack

Robert McMillan writes on PC World:

A scrap between two pornographic Web sites turned nasty when one figured out how to take down the other by exploiting a previously unknown quirk in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS).

The attack is known as DNS Amplification. It has been used sporadically since December, but it started getting talked about last month when ISPrime, a small New York Internet service provider, started getting hit hard with what's known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. The attack was launched by the operator of a pornographic Web site who was trying to shut down a competitor, hosted on ISPrime's network, according to Phil Rosenthal, the company's chief technology officer.

The attack on ISPrime started on the morning of Sunday, Jan. 18. It lasted about a day, but what was remarkable was that a relatively small number of PCs were able to generate a very large amount of traffic on the network.

One day later, a similar attack followed, lasting three days. Before ISPrime was able to filter the unwanted traffic, attackers were able to use up about 5GB/second of the company's bandwidth.

posted by Fergie @ 2/04/2009 07:43:00 PM