NEW YORK - Web hosting company ISPrime was hit with a distributed denial of service in January as a result of a war between two online porn rivals.
The competing porn sites used a process known as Domain Name System Amplification to attack each other, according to PCWorld.com. Although New York-based ISPrime declined to name the adult sites for privacy reasons, a company technician went on the record to explain the chain of events.
On Sunday morning, Jan. 18, someone sent a request through roughly 750,000 servers around the world. Because these requests appeared to originate from ISPrime, they bounced back to the company throughout the day at an exponentially increasing number, creating a massive amount of unwanted traffic at a rate of 5GB per second.
ISPrime's team eventually got the situation under control. But another attack followed several days later.
Apparently, one porn site created the phony server request in an attempt to shut down a competitor on ISPrime's network.
The biggest concern among DNS experts is such an attack could hit high-profile targets, such as a government's computer systems. Solutions include filtering hostile traffic through cooperation from an Internet service provider.
