Some time before 1:30 p.m., the company that handles a good portion of routing Internet traffic was attacked.
Traffic reaches Web sites through what are known as Domain Name Servers. TheBatavian.com's traffic direction is handled by GoDaddy.com.
That site was targeted by an apparent denial-of-service attack (overwhelming servers with a bunch of meaningless data).
A person with a Twitter account of @AnonymousOwn3r claimed responsibility for the attack, though there is no confirmation that he or she engineered the attack. The attacker claims to be a leader in the cyber-anarchist group known as Anonymous, but several known members of Anonymous on Twitter have mocked his claim and denied any connection between Anonymous and the attack.
The good news is, since I'm able to post this, we are back online.
Millions of Web sites went off-line today because of the attack. A company of GoDaddy's size should really have stronger security than the success of, and duration of, this attack suggests.
What a releif! I was trying
What a releif! I was trying to get on all day at work! I was begining to think my emploer was on to me and was blocking thebatavian from me! I was starting to go through withdrawls!
As Howard pointed out, it's
As Howard pointed out, it's not yet clear what caused the outage at GoDaddy. Customers may or may not get an honest root cause analysis (RCA) during the upcoming days. What is known is that the DNS is a perennial hacking target yet successful attacks against it are not well documented.
What is clear is that all major Internet service providers have their moments - whether it's a total GMail outage, or when Amazon EC2 goes offline for hours - these are "perfect storm" type events that defy redundant engineering, but they do happen. GoDaddy had its black eye today, but it's neither the first nor will it be the last company to suffer this type of black eye; it will push through.
From a technical standpoint, there are a lot of factors that can potentially take a website offline. Like Howard said, in this case it was DNS. For a domain hostmaster, in terms of DNS, if you're with a major registrar like GoDaddy, using their free/bundled DNS service is generally a very safe bet because they're substantial operations with good redundancy. Again, this was a major anomaly, hence the newsworthiness.
Besides your registrar, another reasonable option for authoritative DNS service is your VPS provider. Like your registrar, your VPS (or web hosting) provider will offer you free authoritative DNS service of relatively high quality via their name servers, just for being with them.
For the best results, one can spread his DNS service across two providers, e.g. his registrar on one hand and his VPS host on the other. There are also a multitude of well-known companies that provide a la carte DNS service for a reasonable fee. You can even run your own DNS service from your VPS host itself, and then slave to another provider for redundancy. Generally at least two authoritative DNS server hostnames/IPs are required per RFC and by any registrar's control panel, but it's up to you to make sure the two hosts/IPs are not connected at the hip.
With multiple DNS providers, if one provider goes offline, name service will still be available from another - so your website stays online.
While it's true that it's a bit more complex to configure third-party DNS with your registrar, it certainly can be achieved through the registrar's control panel. Check with your tech consultant for details regarding these options.
I agree - whew! What a
I agree - whew! What a nightmare that could have been. I truly appreciate this site and the news it offers (and so speedily).