Namecheap, a popular domain registrar and web hosting service, was at the receiving end of a 100Gbps Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which knocked off over 300 websites for almost 3 hours.
Dubbed by Namecheap as “one of the largest attacks anyone has seen or dealt with”, the DDoS attack was allegedly of a new type which neither the registrar nor its network partners had encountered before.
“At around 15.55 GMT / 11.55 EST, a huge DDoS attack started against 300 or so domains on our DNS platform”, noted Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall and Vice President Matt Russell in a shared blog post.
The duo went onto say that Namecheap’s DNS platform is a global and redundant platform spread across 3 continents and 5 countries and protects its assets against DDoS attacks on an almost-daily basis. However the duo announced that its platform ‘struggled’.
“The sheer size of the attack overwhelmed many of our DNS servers resulting in inaccessibility and sluggish performance. 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”, the duo added.
The attack took down around 300 domains for around 3 hours, but by Thursday afternoon Namecheap revealed that 99 percent of its services were up and running normally.
