A distributed denial-of-service attack that choked off a number of high-profile Websites June 15 was "sophisticated, international, and large-scale," according to Akamai Technologies, a data management and content distribution company whose servers were hit in a strike the company said was aimed at specific customer sites including Yahoo, the FBI, Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
Akamai said their monitoring systems spotted the attack quickly enough, and company personnel were able to mitigate the attack by working with the affected customers closely and adjusting company infrastructure. The company is also cooperating with federal law enforcement to trace the source of the attack.
The attack began at about 5:30 a.m. EDT and ended at about 7:45 a.m., according to Internet performance researcher Keynote Systems. Akamai won't exactly call the attacks denial-of-service, but others, including Keynote, have called it that very thing.
Google said their Website was affected but restored around the world quickly, while Yahoo said they were still probing how the attacks affected them. Yahoo had its most difficulty with its e-mail system, making the timing of the attack especially critical because Yahoo had launched a newly upgraded and expanded version of its free e-mail service earlier that day. Glitches with the new e-mail service continued well into the afternoon June 15.
"As we upgrade tens of millions of Yahoo mail accounts for consumers worldwide," Yahoo spokesperson Mary Osako said in a statement, "some users may experience temporary fluctuation in service. We expect Yahoo mail accounts to resume to normal after upgrades are completed."
Other affected Websites were said to include Federal Express, Lycos, Symantec, and AltaVista, at least two of which are known as Akamai clients.
Akamai said the overall domain name service impact of the attack was about four percent of its customer base with two percent showing noticeable impact, and "less than 1 percent of Akamai customers [having] a significant impact affecting more than 20 percent of their users."
The attack hit the company's Internet naming functionality and caused some delays in DNS name resolutions and even timed-out DNS requests, the company said. The service returned to normal, Akamai said, about 10:45 a.m. EDT.
