What is Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS)?
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing denial of service for users of the targeted system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users. These attacks are extremely significant, as the root nameservers function as the Internet backbone, translating text-based Internet hostnames into IP addresses. As the nameservers provide this service for DNS lookups worldwide, attacks against the root nameservers are attempts to disable the Internet itself, rather than specific websites. The first attack occurred on October 21, 2002, and lasted for approximately one hour. A second attack occurred on February 6, 2007. The attack began at 10:30 UTC, and lasted about five hours. Although none of the servers crashed, two of the root servers reportedly “suffered badly”, while others saw “heavy traffic”. The bo
