A screen shot of Islandnet's front page which features a DDoS attack warning
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Canadian Web hosting provider Islandnet (www.islandnet.com) was hit with a DDoS attack on Wednesday morning, taking the website and many of its customers’ websites offline for more than 24 hours.
The Victoria, British Columbia-based hosting provider alerted customers about the attack Wednesday morning on Twitter, posting that it experienced a “DDoS attack this morning.”
The company’s website, along with the websites of its customers, intermittently saw periods of downtime on Wednesday and part of Thursday.
Since 11:05 a.m. Wednesday, Mark Morley of Islandnet has been posting updates on the company’s News & Announcements section.
In the initial post, Morley explained that the attack is “known as a UDP flood”. He writes:
“Basically the ‘bad guys’ are sending millions of bogus data packets to one of our IP addresses, clogging our network connections, which in turn makes it hard for legitimate traffic to get through (although some does). Blocking the IP address of the sender doesn’t help for long since it’s spoofed, the packets can be made to look like they come from anywhere, when in fact they are coming from many different places (thus the “distributed” aspect). As well, the filtering has to be done upstream on our bandwidth provider’s network. We are working with our upstream to block the attacks as they happen, but they keep changing the spoofed address and the IP that they are attacking.”
According to Islandnet’s most recent Twitter update around 1 p.m. Thursday, it appeared as though the company has not yet resolved the issue:
“Still dealing with DDOS attacks and Bell is working on it – We are currently have partial services available.”
Victoria-based grocery chain Thrifty Foods, fashion boutique Smoking Lily, Cangeneology, and Volunteer Victoria were among the Islandnet customers affected by the attack.
Founded in the early 1990s, Islandnet provides dialup and high speed Internet connections, email management, Web hosting, and other Internet tools to thousands of customers in British Columbians and around the world.
DDoS attacks recently gained worldwide media attention when Sony’s PlayStation network was hit with a DDoS attack that has sent the network offline for nearly a month.
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