Denial of Service Attacks on Internet Servers...

The Domain Name Servers that support the Internet were subjected to a major Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, earlier this week. Domain Name Servers translate domain names (such as www.google.com) into IP addresses that computers can recognize. The servers were flooded with bogus traffic that was intended to prevent legitimate traffic from reaching the servers, thus denying legitimate users from accessing the services they desire.

In this case, the attack was not overly successful, partly due to the redundancies in place to protect the servers. The graph shows "dropped queries" or traffic that did not make it to the 13 servers that form the backbone of the Internet. Red means >90% of traffic was dropped to a particular server. In this attack, only two of the servers were significantly interrupted.

This is not the first time such an attack has been attempted. For more information on DoS, take a look at my presentation (pdf) on a similar attack that occurred in 2002.

The graph comes from RIPE.

Chalmer