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Monday afternoon, our many servers hosted at SoftLayer, one of the fastest growing data center companies in the U.S. started being unable to resolve names using Solutions‘ nameservers at worldnic.com. In addition, our e-mail servers at SoftLayer were unable to connect to Network Solutions’ hosted e-mail services at netsolmail.com to deliver e-mail. SoftLayer claims that Network Solutions is undergoing a DoS attack.
In this type of attack, where DoS stands for Denial of Service, the attacker typically floods a public service with more traffic than the service can handle, making the service unavailable to any legitimate users.
A lot of old established companies have had their domain names registered with Network Solutions since Network Solutions was the only available domain name registrar. Some of these established companies have even started to rely on the DNS services provided by Network Solutions as part of their domain name registration service. In addition, Network Solutions started offering e-mail hosting, likely to compete with other domain name registrars that were offering similar services.
Unfortunately, according to SoftLayer’s technicians, Network Solutions has been undergoing a heavy Denial of Service attack which has made their e-mail and DNS services unavailable to large portions of the Internet. NetSol are apparently making demands on large data center providers, including SoftLayer, for help with isolating the source. “Currently the attacker is spoofing the source addresses making it quite difficult to track down. As such Network Solutions requested that we block all outbound traffic to their netblock until further notice. They have also blocked all of our IP space inbound to their network at their provider’s edge,” said E. Kujawski, a senior network engineer at SoftLayer, in their private user forum.
SpamStopsHere has routed all its SoftLayer traffic through another provider that is apparently not affected by this outage. We hope that Network Solutions resolves this issue, and my only complaint so far is that Network Solutions and SoftLayer have both been very private regarding the issue and an estimated time until it is resolved. “They have blocked a number of providers including a large subset of Cogent IPs which is causing havoc around the US currently,” added Kujawski. However, I have unable to confirm this via any other sources. The oncoming shift at the network operations center for Network Solutions had not yet been briefed on any problem and was unwilling to comment further.
Tag: network solutions
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