Visualization of attack on root DNS servers

A number of news outlets have reported on today's unusual attack against a few of the world's "root" domain name servers. The graph above, plotted by Ripe NCC, represents requests from a group of monitoring servers to the "G" rootserver, operated by the US Defense Information Systems Agency. The yellow spots on the graph are periods where the "G" server failed to respond to requests over 60% of the time, the red spots are failures in the 90% range. What you see is a server with the best of protection, care, feeding and security being saturated by a distributed attack, but weathering it reasonably well. (Take the jump to see server "L" having a bit more difficulty)

DNS is essentially the phonebook that allows node on the internet to find each other by name. A total outage of DNS, or the compromise of DNS leading to incorrect answers (referred to as DNS poisoning) would spell complete doom for just about every internet service you can name. Thankfully, in this case, all the safeguards and redundancy put in place to keep things humming along nicely did exactly as they were supposed. So, instead of discussing a crippling period of downtime over landline telephones, we're talking about this attack as a few neat blips on a graph.

Tags: news