Attack on UltraDNS affects Amazon cloud customers

Attack on UltraDNS affects Amazon cloud customers

DNS service provider says attack was focused on US West Coast data centers
(12/24/2009)

A DDoS attack on a large provider of DNS management services caused downtime and sluggishness for many of its customers Wednesday evening, sending ripples to customers of firms that included Amazon Web Services and Salesforce. Amazon’s online shopping Web site experienced problems as well and so did Walmart.com, CNET reported.

This is a second DDoS attack on UltraDNS this year, following an April 1 incident, which also affected both Amazon and Salesforce, besides other clients. Amazon’s cloud computing services – some of whose customers felt effects of this week’s attack – also suffered from a direct DDoS attack in October, when one of its client’s virtual machine instances was flooded with a large amount of UDP packets.

CNET reported that this week’s attack was targeted at Neustar (owner of the UltraDNS brand) data centers in Palo Alto and San Jose, Calif. A Neustar official told the news service that alarms went off around 4:45 p.m. PST.

Amazon Web Services detected a problem about one hour later, reporting on the Service Health Dashboard around 6:10 p.m. PST that some Elastic Compute Cloud customers in northern California and in northern Virginia were having trouble with resolving DNS. Some of the company’s S3 customers were affected as well.

Amazon reported that DNS issues had been resolved around 6:40 p.m.


- wong chee tat :)