A distributed denial of service attack knocked the website of the domain name registrar Network Solutions LLC offline this morning and affected an unknown number of its clients’ sites as well.
Network Solutions announced on its Facebook page that it was experiencing a DDoS attack just before 11 a.m. EST, and then at 1:30 p.m. said the attack had been mitigated. Beyond that, the company has been relatively mum on the issue, angering its customers by failing to keep them adequately updated on its website and various social media channels.
This is the second time in a month that organizations registered with the DNS provider have suffered outages. In June, researchers from the networking giant Cisco reported on their security blog that attackers hijacked Network Solutions’ DNS name-servers and replaced them with name-servers belonging to a Ztomy[.]com. According to Cisco, the incident in June affected as many as 5,000 domains.
At around 1 PM today, Cisco took to its security blog again and noted that Network Solution’s own website had been offline for at least the last 24 hours.
Threatpost contacted a spokesperson from Network Solutions parent company, Web.com, via Twitter and email, but the spokesperson failed to respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Cisco also wrote on its security blog that Network Solutions is an attractive target because it was the original registrar for .com, .org, and .net domain names.
