WEBWIRE – Friday, April 03, 2009

Cyberspace 9/11 is here. A trojan worm similar to the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 are causing havoc to companies such as Time Warner Cable, Register.com and UltraDNS owned by Neustar and to millions of their customers throughout the United States and Europe.

Time Warner Cable’s director of digital communications said it’s DNS servers have been targeted by “denial of service” attacks for seven days commencing on February 19. DNS servers matches easy to remember web addresses to corresponding numbers and without these translations working, web browsers are unable to find their destinations.

UltraDNS the Reston, VA company had serious DOS attacks on April 2 and acknowledged in a statement that same day: “Early this morning, our monitoring systems detected a significant denial of service attack, which affected a small subset of our customers, in some cases for as long as a few hours.” Customers affected included Amazon, com, Oracle, Juniper, Diamond,com, Salesforce.com, Advertising.com and Petco.com.

Anyone trying to reach those websites and others impacted by this attack received error notices like “page cannot be displayed”.

Although both Time Warner Cable and UltraDNS claim to have the problem under control, Register.com is in its third day with no end in sight. Larry Kutscher, CEO of Register.com said: “unnamed persons all over the world are trying to attack us. Every time we get it under control, it morphs into another attack. It’s morphed at least three to four times. It keeps changing direction.” Read More