The Web-hosting service Namecheap has been struck with what it says was one the most significant distributed-denial-of-service attacks anyone has seen or been hit by.
On Thursday morning approximately 300 domains managed by Namecheap were targeted in a DDoS attack. The huge attack triggered widespread connectivity problems among the tens of thousands of other domains using Namecheap’s DNS system.
“Today is one of the days that, as a service provider who strives to deliver excellence day in and day out, you wish you never had,” CEO of Namecheap Richard Kirkendall and Vice President Matt Russell stated in a statement.
Kirkendall and Russell mentioned they are always combating DDoS attacks and more often than not are able to mitigate them. Even so, Thursday’s attack was too significant to contain.
“The sheer size of the attack overwhelmed many of our DNS servers, resulting in inaccessibility and sluggish performance,” Kirkendall and Russell added. “Our initial estimates show the attack size to be over 100Gbps, making this one of the largest attacks anyone has seen or dealt with. And this is a new type of attack, one that we and our hardware and network partners had not encountered before.”
Experts believe that it was probably a NTP reflection which utilizes 3rd party servers (separate from attacking server) to carry out the attack that hit Cloudflare and many other servers last week.
