Australian web host NetRegistry has been hit with a continuing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack leaving many customers unable to access their websites or virtual private servers (VPS) over the course of the day.
Down and out for the count - NetRegistry suffers DDoS attack
Since around 10am AEST this morning, customers using NetRegistry’s cloud-based web hosting or VPS service reported being able to access their sites intermittently. NetRegistry engineers soon confirmed it was experiencing a DDoS attack, where multiple connections are created swamping a server and eventually bringing it offline as it struggles to cope with the huge load.
Around lunchtime, NetRegistry confirmed it believed it had resolved the issue but near 2pm the attack re-commenced, once again bringing hosted sites offline.
As at 5pm AEST, access has been restored for most customers except for those using a Telstra-provided internet connection – access to all sites on the Zeus Dynamic shared hosting infrastructure remains offline, with an ETA for a fix unavailable at this stage.
The company has since confirmed that now shared hosting of sites using PHP or a MYSQL database remain impacted as of now.
“This means customers using Telstra internet connections will not be able to access websites hosted on Zeus Dynamic shared hosting infrastructure,” NetRegistry explains. “Further update[s] will be posted when confirmed as resolved.”
“Unfortunately we cannot supply an ETA on a DDOS attack mitigation process.”
No information is known at this stage about who is behind the continuing attacks, or whether any individual site hosted by NetRegistry is being intentionally targeted or if it’s an attack on NetRegistry in general.
The outage has also impacted upon NetRegistry resellers and its own subsidiaries such as ZipHosting.
Last year in a more prominent incident, customers experienced downtime when attackers targeted the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) website hosted by NetRegistry.
People these days…