​Melbourne IT confirms DDoS attack behind DNS outage

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Melbourne IT has said its DNS outage on Thursday was the result of a large distributed denial-of-service attack.

Australian domain name registrar Melbourne IT confirmed on Thursday afternoon that it had experienced a large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on its DNS servers that disrupted its web hosting, email platforms, and access to the company’s customer administration portal.

The company said the attack impacted a large number of its customers.

The incident started at 10am AEST, Melbourne IT said, noting that in response, it implemented its DDoS mitigation services as standard operating procedure and international traffic management measures.

“This returned normal service by 11:30am,” the company said.

The DNS outage affected Melbourne IT and subsidiaries Netregistry and TPP Wholesale, with the now confirmed DDoS attack bringing down the company’s TheConsole, cPanel, Cloud Hosting, and Mail platforms services.

Netregistry, which was scooped up by Melbourne IT in 2014 for AU$50.4 million, boasts over 500,000 customers that were potentially affected by the DNS outage.

For the 2016 financial year, Melbourne IT reported a 91 percent increase year over year in net profit after tax to AU$10.7 million, on revenue of AU$168 million. Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) for the year was AU$28.2 million, up 71 percent from FY15’s AU$16.5 million.

 Source:https://www.zdnet.com/