March 28, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Domain registrar Joker (joker.com) recently announced that its nameservers suffered a distributed denial of service attack last Monday, causing outages for customers. Joker has responded by adding more nameservers (some which are hosted in DDoS-protected external data centers), reserving more bandwidth, and implementing automatic systems to react on certain incidents.
Level 1 PCI DSS Certified Service Provider! DataPipe delivers the best network & support; top tier data centers; New York metro, Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai. DataPipe - Personal Touch, Global Reach.
More than 550,000 domains are registered with the Germany-based Joker--all of which are likely affected by the attack. Upstream providers reported traffic peaks of about 1.3Gbps on a single line, which was enough to overload Joker's lines and creating communication problems between its border routers and the upstream providers.
"Joker.com currently experiences massive distributed denial of service attacks against nameservers," says Joker in an advisory on its Web site. "This affects DNS resolution of Joker.com itself, and also domains which make use of Joker.com nameservers. We are very sorry for this issue, but we are working hard for a permanent solution."
It is not yet clear whether the problems at Joker are related to the specifics of its DDoS defenses or the complete volume of the attack. Recently, a number of Internet security groups have advised the Internet community about the gravity of DNS recursion attacks, which can use the nameserver system to intensify a DDoS launched by a bot network.
