E-commerce companies such as Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Expedia were unavailable Wednesday evening in some parts of the US. This was due to an attack on these companies’ DNS provider, Neustar (better known by its brand name, UltraDNS).
…the company received a disproportionately high number of queries coming into the system, and analyzed it as an attack. Neustar deployed “a mitigation response” within minutes of the attack, he said, and brought matters under control within an hour. The response limited the problems to Northern California, he said.
What is DNS?
Web sites need DNS providers to translate the character-based URLs that people can remember to the IP addresses that Web sites actually use to list themselves on the Internet. When a DNS provider is overwhelmed with malicious requests for IP addresses, the system can overload and prevent legitimate users from reaching their destinations.
In other words, the language of the internet is based on IP addresses: 192.12.122.1 and similar addresses. Remembering such numbers is not as easy as remembering “google.com.” DNS does the translation between google.com and the IP address. (Hint: if you were type in the actual IP address in the URL bar of your web browser, you’d still be directed to the correct site!).
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