Hackers suck. Now that I've said that I'm sure I can expect many attacks on my own network, but, well, they do. UrbanPotato has been down for the last two days due to a DOS attack on the DNS servers for our domain name. The DNS servers I use are free and come from www.granitecanyon.com. They're a nice bunch of folks. They offer DNS for free, and they have a great open-software-mindset toward the networking community at large. But they probably pissed off someone who tried to re-route a name they don't own, or someone who didn't read the UNIX binding rules and couldn't get their SOA records right. And that someone fought back, by launching an attack not on the company, but on the company's DNS servers.
The attack didn't really hurt Granite Canyon much. Hell, they offer DNS services for free so none of their users can really complain (Ok, I did give them money through PayPal, but only after I had been using them, freely, for several months). No, instead, they hurt all the thousdands of folks whose domain names are routed through Granite Canyon's servers. Folks who, unlike Big Business, cannot afford to spend cash on professional DNS hosting. Folks, in other words, just like them.
How did I get out of this DOS hell? Well, I switched to a different DNS service. It costs me money, which makes me a bit cranky, but UrbanPotato is back up. Some of my friends are still in the process of either waiting it out or switching their DNS as well. If you regularly read any of these sites, I'm afraid they're not quite out of the woods yet:
Hopefully we can get then humming along again soon.