Between 2:30am and 5:00am CDT on April 8, The Planet's authoritative name servers (ns1.theplanet.com, ns2.theplanet.com) were flooded again with a large brute force Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which caused service issues for customers using The Planet’s DNS. Unlike the previous attack, this attack did not appear to be DNS-specific; instead, it targeted resources indirectly supporting DNS services. Because the nature of this attack was significantly different from the previous event, mirroring the techniques to mitigate the previous attack was ineffective. Once our investigation determined the nature of the attack, we were able to apply filters throughout our DNS support system to alleviate the effects.
The Planet's network and DNS performance have been restored, and the attack originator has ceased actions. Any lingering issues may be indicative of a different problem that may have been exacerbated by the attack and should be resolved quickly. We are working on several projects to help mitigate similar attacks in the future. Once those plans are in order, we will update this DNS Status announcement thread.
We understand that other providers are experiencing similar events. We will reach out to them, pool our information and then work together to find consistencies between attacks. Our goal is to establish best practices as an industry to better respond to these recent events.