The Arab satellite television network Al-Jazeera suffered a second day of sustained distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against its English and Arabic language Web sites on Wednesday.
The attacks have pushed the network, which is based in
"All of our Web sites are down. The
AlSeddiqi and others describe a powerful and coordinated attack on Al-Jazeera's Web sites that began on March 25, shortly after the network published photos of
Beginning on Tuesday, Al-Jazeera was hit with traffic in excess of 200 Mbps and up to 300 Mbps, he said.
The network's Web sites typically receive traffic in the range of 50 or 60 Mbps. With the commencement of hostilities, however, traffic to Al-Jazeera's sites had spiked to more than 150 Mbps, AlSeddiqi said.
The attacks were described as a DNS (Domain Name System) flood attack by Joanne Tucker, managing editor of Al-Jazeera's English language Web site, whose address is http://english.aljazeera.net.
DNS flood attacks send a high volume of Internet traffic to the name servers that are responsible for a particular Web domain, rendering those servers unresponsive.
In response to the attacks, Al-Jazeera attempted to increase its bandwidth allocation, but the attackers scaled their efforts to meet the increase, according to AlSeddiqi.
As a result of the sustained attacks, the
That company, DataPipe, a service of Hoboken Web Services, in
DataPipe did not have a contract or a relationship with Al-Jazeera itself, the company said.
Al-Jazeera was told that its site would continue to be hosted only until the end of March, AlSeddiqi said.
The recent attacks and the decision by one of its Web hosting companies has IT staff at Al-Jazeera suspicious of larger forces that may be at work.
"We feel it's an organization with knowhow and money. They have very powerful machines to do [the attack] and someone to pay for the bandwidth," AlSeddiqi said.
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