18.11.08

BBC Website Hit By DDoS Attack


The British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc.co.uk) was hit by a DDoS attack on Thursday, according to a statement sent to the Inquirer. The BBC said the attack originated in a number of different countries but didn’t specify which. When the BBC techies blocked international access to a limited subset of servers, it resulted in a marked improvement of the serving of bbc.co.uk. Service supplier Siemens was forced to block addresses and prevent the attack using other methods like changing the DNS settings.
The attack appears to have lasted for 1 hour and 15 minutes, which is the longest time the site has been offline during the entire 2008, was also confirmed by the distributed uptime monitoring company Pingdom earlier today. During the attack, the BBC website responded very slowly, and our monitoring shows that for a total of 1 hour and 15 minutes it did not respond at all. The downtime was spread over multiple short intervals, lasting just a few minutes each time. The attack lasted the entire evening. It started to have an effect after 5 p.m. CET and the performance was not back to normal until after 10 p.m. CET. Analyzing the response times of the website clearly shows the effect the DDoS attack had on the performance of the BBC website.
With the lack of specific details regarding the DDoS attack provided by the BBC, the reason for this attack is unclear.

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