Today, over 3 million domains, email addresses, DNS and websites were, and continue to be attacked as we speak, and internet giant 123-reg suffer a DDOS attack. A DDOS attack is a distributed denial of service, meaning it is not coming from one place, it is coming from multiple machines usually sending a request with a bad source, so when the router on 123 side tries and replies it take a while to time out – in simple terms, overloads the server.
From 11:30am to 11.50am the 123-reg network undergone a massive distributed denial of service attack, orginating from China.
However, what can you do to protect your websites against DDOS attacks on your hosting providers? Simple answer -make sure your web host utilise geo graphically disperced name servers. In any usual circumstance, you won’t notice a difference as when a user tries to access your website, anycast technology is used to locate and serve the geographically nearest name server – optimum performance. Anycast is a network addressing and routing methodology were datagrams from a single sender are routed to the topologically nearest node in a group of potential receivers all identified by the same destination address.
Furthermore, for those of you who use Google Mail and the Google Apps, you will also be affected through the 123 Reg DDOS attacked, as the 123-reg DNS is also affected. You may however, be lucky, and have a cached version to which you will not notice a change.
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