Aggressive DDoS Attack Causes Timeouts for DNS Root Servers

Hackers and cybercrooks have long utilized crafty methods for conducting DDoS attacks, which are technically described as Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Such attacks are known for flooding a web server with so much traffic that it eventually crashes.

In the latest scheme of DDoS attacks on the internet, which take place on a daily occurrence, unknown individuals conducted a large-scale DDoS attack on DNS root servers. The servers happened to be a series of large DNS root server operators responsible for directing a large amount of internet traffic around the world.

The DDoS attacks blasted up to five million queries per second on each DNS root name server. The attack first initiated on November 30, 2015, and then lasted for almost three hours. A second shorter blast from the attack took place on December 1, 2015, and only lasted for about an hour.

During the attacks no permanent damage was caused. However, users attempting to access the multitude of sites affected by the DNS DDoS attack had a delay in their queries from web browsers, SSH and FTP clients.

While some users were momentarily disrupted from accessing sites and servers affected by the DDoS attack, the DNS protocol's design was able to combat the attack and leave the services online. Because the DNS root name server was robust, it was able to thwart the DDoS attack in a way to refer to the fallback system employed by the DNS setup.

Currently, no one knows who the perpetrators are for the recent DDoS attacks. As it seemed to be a large scale DDoS attack, the reasons for the attack are also unknown. No one is speculating as to the reasons for the attack. Though, experts from RootOps, the DNS root server operators, are recommended that ISPs should consider Source Address Validation to prevent the specific type of DDoS attack recently carried out. It is clear that the DDoS conducted used IP address spoofing, which ISPs can easily find and implement methods to prevent.