On Tuesday an attack on domain name system infrastructure overwhelmed at least three of the 13 servers that help manage global computer traffic.
The attacks appeared to target UltraDNS, the company provides DNS services for 26 top-level domains including .info and .org. Officials with NeuStar Inc., which owns UltraDNS, confirmed only that it had observed an unusual increase in traffic.
Among the targeted "root" servers that manage global Internet traffic were ones operated by the Defense Department and the Internet's primary oversight body.
"There was what appears to be some form of attack during the night hours here in California and into the morning," said John Crain, chief technical officer for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
He said the attack was continuing and so was the hunt for its origin. "I don't think anybody has the full picture," Crain said. "We're looking at the data."
This is most powerful attack on the domain name system infrastructure after October 2002, when UltraDNS was flooded with nearly 2 million requests per second to each device connecting the network to the Internet
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