DoubleClick downed by denial-of-service attack

The massive attack crippled the company's Web site and ad servers

By Paul Roberts

July 27, 2004 12:00 PM ET

IDG News Service - Internet advertising company DoubleClick Inc. was shut down today by a denial-of-service attack launched from computers on the Internet, a company spokeswoman confirmed.
The massive DoS attack began at about 10:30 a.m. EDT in the U.S. and crippled the company's Web site and its advertising servers, which distribute Web advertisements to other Web sites on the Internet. Ripple effects from the attacks were felt across the Internet, as Web pages that display DoubleClick ads struggled to retrieve them from the company's servers, causing "severe disruption" for DoubleClick customers, according to a company statement.
Leading Web sites all experienced significant slowdowns during the period covered by the attack, including Web pages for the Washington Post Co., New York Times Co., Cnet Networks Inc., Nortel Networks Corp. and InfoWorld magazine, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a Web performance measurement company in San Mateo, Calif.
Keynote measurements for the period covered by the attacks show that the "base page" -- or basic HTML documents -- served by those Web sites loaded quickly, but that the "full page," which includes any content the Web page points to, suddenly began to load very slowly, said Lloyd Taylor, vice president of operations at Keynote.
DoubleClick's DNS servers were the target of the attack, which came from unidentified "outside sources" and lasted for approximately four hours, said Jennifer Blum, vice president of corporate communications at DoubleClick.
DNS is the system of servers that matches up reader-friendly names such as DoubleClick.net with the numeric Internet Protocol addresses used by machines on the Internet to route traffic.
Keynote recorded a threefold slowdown in response time for Web pages beginning at about 7 a.m. EDT and ending at 1:30 p.m. EDT. The company doesn't know what caused the slowdowns, but the behavior of the pages is consistent with a DoS attack, Taylor said.
The performance of DoubleClick's servers had returned to normal by late this afternoon, Taylor said.
Staff members are taking steps to "resolve the situation permanently," Blum said.

Reprinted with permission from

IDG.net
Story copyright 2009 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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