Two days left before Christmas, and everyone is online buying last minute gifts and presents for those that they “forgot” about, but what happens when you can’t access your favorite site?
Amazon, Wal-Mart, Expedia and other large ecommerce companies all had their sites go offline for a couple of hours Wednesday evening from about 6:45pm CDT until 7:40pm CDT (or later!). But wait, aren’t these the same large companies that say they use “The Cloud” and how wonderful and secure things are? Why yes they are! Didn’t Amazon have an outage just the other day also, only that time it was a power issue and a redundancy issue? Why yes it was! Very good for keeping up!
So here we are again, a few days before the “big day” and the sites are offline again. This time it was the result of a malicious attack on Neustar (the company that provides DNS service through the UltraDNS Brand Name). The attack was directed against Neustar facilities and as such it clogged up all outbound traffing and requests. Some people were fortunate enough to still be able to access Amazon and other eCommerce sites, however they would have done so at a very slow crawl!
Here’s the thing that gets me – they’re on The Cloud and the wonderful redundant system that it is. Why wouldn’t a company that large have multiple DNS locations? This way if one was under an attack, others would take over? I mean, MY DNS is setup so that if one fails, the other takes over, and I can change a DNS IP destination within minutes if needed. I know the attack is pointed to the DNS machines themselves, but shouldn’t there be safeguards in place? A redundancy if you will? 
Along with the larger eCommerce companies that experienced the outage, many smaller companies and Web Hosting services were also taken down by the attack as Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services were also affected (Cloud Hosting). This is not the first DDoS for Amazon and UltraDNS. In April 2009 NeuStar UltraDNS was responsible for taking other giants such as SalesForce.com, advertising.com and Petco.com offline for several hours.
Maybe Google’s entry into the Public DNS field isn’t such a bad thing after all!
Read the entire News Article at http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10421577-265.html
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