This past weekend, internet registrar Register.com suffered a down infrastructure for nearly 24 hours due to a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack.  The security breach impacted their DNS, hosting and webmail clients, making services unavailable to subscribers and impacting their over 2 million registered domains.

How do these attacks happen?

Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers.   There are essentially two general forms of DoS attacks: those that crash services and those that flood services, and there are a variety of methods perpetrators can use to do either.

How can companies protect themselves from DDOS and similar cyber attacks?

100% DNS uptime is essential for any online business.  Typically most domain registrars and hosting providers only provide you with 2 name servers that exist on the same network segment. A DDOS attack or other connectivity failure impacting your name server network could wipe your website off the face of the earth.  That is why it is important to have multiple name servers on unique connection points.  This backup DNS service ensures that DNS for your domain always resolves to where it should.

Backup DNS may not sound important, but without it, your site is left vulnerable to DDOS and other cyber attacks which could lead to lost partners, clients, and eventually lost business.   It’s an affordable safeguard to ensure your site maintains 100% uptime, all the time.   If you’re not currently protected, be sure to try it out today.