Cyber Attack Hobbles Major Sites(Including Amazon)

[RamboLiberal]

Source: CBS News

An attack directed at the DNS provider for some of the Internet's larger e-commerce companies, including Amazon.com, took several Internet shopping sites offline Wednesday evening, two days before Christmas.

Neustar, the company that provides DNS services under the UltraDNS brand name, confirmed an attack took place Wednesday afternoon, taking out sites or rendering them extremely sluggish for about an hour. A representative who answered the customer support line said the attacks were directed against Neustar facilities in Palo Alto and San Jose, Calif, and Allen Goldberg, vice president of corporate communications for Neustar, confirmed that at about 4:45 p.m. PST, "our alarms went off."

Goldberg said the company received a disproportionately high number of queries coming into the system, and analyzed it as an attack. Neustar deployed "a mitigation response" within minutes of the attack, he said, and brought matters under control within an hour. The response limited the problems to Northern California, he said.

In addition to the high-profile sites, dozens of smaller sites that rely upon Amazon for Web hosting services were also taken down by the attack. Amazon's S3 and EC2 services were affected by the problems, according to Jeff Barr, Amazon lead Web Evangelist, who retweeted a report to that effect without clarification and confirmed it in later tweets.



Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/23/tech/cnettechnews/main6017048.shtml?tag=stack

[GeorgeGist]

1. Web Evangelist in retweet?

Sounds like Elmer Fudd.

[SkyDaddy7]

2. I guess since I do not follow the workings of

Web controllers I was not familiar with the term "Web Evangelist"...It did throw me for loop!

So, I never made it to the part you commented on until I read your comment and then I nearly spit coffee on my keyboard! Thanks for the morning laugh!

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Web Evangelist???????

fundies everywhere now, damn.

[MadMaddie]

4. These type of cyber attacks are on the rise and this is the

exact reason why President Obama now has a Cyber Security Czar to work on defending networks and other critical infrastructures against Cyber Attacks!!