DDOS moves upstream

Despite the warning of the last three years major online businesses continue to be disrupted by Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS). The lastest to be under attack is Joker.com. From their website:

Joker.com currently experiences massive distributed denial of service attacks against nameservers.

 Joker is a German domain registrar that is responsible for over 500,000 domains. Their DNS servers are under attack. That means their customer's domains are under attack as well.  There are some interesting implications here.  As the criminals that execute these attacks become more savvy all sorts of online businesses will be targeted. If you are a media company, online transaction processor, e-commerce site, popular blog, foreign exchange site, stock trading site, or bank you might want to think about investing in DDoS defenses.

But this also means that domain registrars are going to have to think about beefing up their security and availability. The cost of doing so can be upwards of $200K. That would not be a problem for a big successful company but it raises the barrier to entry for a small start up.  They will want to consider hosting their DNS with a secure service provider. Prolexic comes to mind as does Secure-24.

 Next time you consider launching a website ask your hosting provider *and* your registrar what sort of DDoS attack they can survive.