Hosting firm felled by attacks
Published: 09 Feb 2004 09:55 GMT
A wave of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against hosting giant WebCentral, which began on Saturday, downed the network for a second time on Sunday.
According to a statement issued by the Queensland-based company, the attack began on Saturday at 4 p.m., affecting all customers with systems located in its primary data centre. WebCentral's secondary data centre was also knocked offline briefly by the attack when fail-safe systems began re-directing the DDoS traffic to the secondary site. WebCentral was able to restore full service by 4 a.m. on Sunday morning; however, the company experienced another shorter outage today, according to its chief executive, Lloyd Ernst.
"The outage today ranged from about 35 minutes to 120 minutes," he told ZDNet Australia . "We are getting the authorities involved in this investigation."
According to Ernst, the attack was conducted using a technique that the company had not seen before, but he would not be drawn on the precise nature of the bombardment.
"The attacks were unique," he said. "We've been asked [by the authorities] not to give out too many details."
DDoS attacks against hosting providers are very common, Ernst said, adding that circumventing garden-variety DDoS attacks is not that difficult and "is something that we spend a lot of time and energy on".
The company is not anticipating any further outages.
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