Namecheap hit with a DDoS attack

Domain registrar Namecheap faced some serious network problems earlier today, after being hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

After almost six hours of problematic connectivity, Namecheap appears to have regained control of the situation.

According to status.namecheap.com, the problem started around 11am EST:

To our regret most of our Free DNS and Default v2 nameservers are under DDoS attack.

If your domain name(s) is using our Free DNS or Default DNS v2  (freedns1-5.registrar-servers.com, dns1-5.registrar-servers.com) the following services may be affected:

• domain resolving;
• domain host record updates;
• URL and email forwarding.

Later on, the problems were addressed, and an update was issued on the entire incident, via the CEO Richard Kirkendall and VP Matt Russell:

Today is one of the days that as a service provider who strives to deliver excellence day in and day, you wish you never had.

At around 15.55 GMT / 11.55 EST, a huge DDoS attack started against 300 or so domains on our DNS platform. Our DNS platform is a redundant, global platform spread across 3 continents and 5 countries that handles the DNS for many of our customers. This is a platform meticulously maintained and ran, and a platform that successfully fends off other DDoS attacks on an almost-daily basis.

Today, however, I am compelled to announce that we struggled. The sheer size of the attack overwhelmed many of our DNS servers resulting in inaccessibility and sluggish performance. Our initial estimates show the attack size to be over 100Gbps, making this one of the largest attacks anyone has seen or dealt with. And this is a new type of attack, one that we and our hardware and network partners had not encountered before.

We responded with our well-practiced mitigation plan while also enabling our backup system for those with affected domains.

It took us around 3 hours to fully mitigate the attack, working closely with our hardware and network vendors. At this moment in time, 99% of our services are back to normal.

I’d like to take this time to apologize to those customers affected. I also wish to iterate that we will learn from this attack and come back stronger, and more robust. We are bringing forward a key DNS infrastructure enhancement program that will see us massively expand the size of our DNS infrastructure and our ability to absorb and fend off attacks like these. We remain firmly committed to delivering the absolute best service possible to our loyal customers.

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