On Sunday between 2:05pm and 2:25pm PST, one of our DSL routers came under a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The exact type attack and the specific target is being investigated. We will be monitoring the network closely watching for future attacks and making any necessary adjustments to our routers to prevent this sort of attack in the future.This attack affected only Qwest and Verizon DSL customers in Western WA. No other services were impacted.
For customers that were affected, the symptoms would have appeared to be an interruption in DSL connectivity, which was not the case. Connections slowed down to the point where they appeared to be down. Once the attack subsided, connections returned to normal.
DDoS attacks disable their target by flooding them with information at a rate beyond what the target system is capable of processing. This is achieved by launching the attack from hundreds or even thousands of systems accros the Internet. Since the attack has no single point of origin, they are extremely difficult to defend against without service disruption. |
