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ICANN name servers come under attack

Kevin Murphy, April 30, 2021, Domain Tech

ICANN’s primary name servers came under a distributed denial of service attack, the Org said earlier this week.

The incident appears to have gone largely unnoticed outside of ICANN and seems to have been successfully mitigated before causing any significant damage.

ICANN said on its web site:

ICANN was subjected to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack targeting NS.ICANN.ORG. This event did not result in harm to the organization. It was mitigated by redirecting traffic flows through a DDoS scrubbing service.

ns.icann.org is the address of ICANN’s name servers, which handle queries to ICANN-owned domains such as icann.org and iana.org.

The servers are also authoritative for Ugandan ccTLD .ug for some reason, and until a few years ago also handled the .int special-purpose TLD and sponsored gTLD .museum.

ICANN did not disclosed the exact date of the attack, nor speculate about whether it was targeted and why it might have happened.

Web.com got pwned

Kevin Murphy, November 4, 2019, Domain Registrars

Web.com, which owns top 20 registrars Network Solutions and Register.com, got itself and millions of its customers hacked a few months ago.
The company disclosed last week that malicious hackers broke into its network in late August, making off with customer account information.
The attack was not discovered until October 16.
The compromised data included “name, address, phone numbers, email address and information about the services that we offer to a given account holder”, Web.com said.
“We encrypt credit card numbers and no credit card data was compromised as a result of this incident,” it added.
Customers are being told to change their password next time they log in to their services.
It’s not clear how many registrants were affected. The NetSol accreditation has over seven million domains in the gTLDs alone, while Register.com has almost 1.8 million.
Web.com said it brought on a private security firm to investigate the attack, and informed US law enforcement.