Service limitations due to DDoS attacks against our systems

jueves 31 de marzo de 2016

Our systems were target of a massive attack wave. By means of a so called DDoS attack, our systems our systems have received up to 60 million requests per minute. The attackers used thousands of infected computers, around the world. These PC “flooded” our systems with mass simultaneous requests. Through the extreme overload, our systems were not merely able to take up normal requests of our customers. Our web interface was temporarily not accessible. This was a dissatisfying situation for every side involved. 

Attacks in dimensions like this leave us providers in most cases without a real option to defend. Recently, leading credit card companies and well known payment service providers had to struggle with attacks and at the end swallow system failures.

Of course, we want to inform our customers as early as possible and create a transparent situation. Due to the broad attack, it was not possible to send a newsletter to inform our customers.  We want to be sure that our customers receive our e-mails. 

Therefore, we switched to using Twitter and Facebook as alternative means of communication.

For tactical reasons we could not give specific information about measures we took to halt the attack. This would have enabled the attackers to adapt their assault. 

It was not possible to make an estimate about the duration or the motive of this attack. We were not informed by the attackers about the upcoming attack and how long it would last. It simply was a criminal act. 

On principle we do not bow to any criminal attempts, we worked hard to find a solution to repel the  attacks and better staunch the flood of requests. To do so, we acquired support by specialized services. We will furthermore elaborate new solutions, to provide you unconfined domain service.

For security reasons, we can not make any statements about specific measures we take. 

All domains, which used our 5 nameservers, were connected and available during the attack. There were no downtimes. We always recommend to use our 5 nameservers all the time. If the 5 nameservers are not set, please make an update to our nameserver-Set, containing all 5. 

We apologize for the inconvenience.