If you were trying to wrap up some last minute Christmas shopping on-line last night, you undoubtedly noticed the issues that a number of sites were having. Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Expedia were all down for a period of time, and the cause was yet another DDOS attack.
A DDOS (or Distributed Denial of Service) attack focusing on DNS services, and can bring down even the largest and most advanced site. The attack hit about 7:45pm Eastern, and a lasted approximately an hour.
Sadly DDOS attacks are becoming a common thing on-line. Over the summer we reported on a massive DDOS attack that brought down Twitter, Facebook, and a number of other major sites for more than a day.
No one is sure who was behind the attack, or what their motivation was. One thing is for sure though, a lot of holiday shopping was seriously hindered because of it.
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