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Security IT

EveryDNS Under Botnet DDoS Attack 154

Posted by kdawson from the man-that-smarts dept.
mellow marsh writes "EveryDNS, sister company to OpenDNS (which runs the PhishTank anti-phishing initiative), has been hit by a massive distributed denial-of-service attack. The attack started sometime Friday afternoon and, from all indications, was targeting Web sites that used free DNS management services provided by EveryDNS. At the height of the DDoS bombardment, EveryDNS was being hit with more than 400mbps of traffic at each of its four locations around the world. From the article: '"We were collateral damage," Ulevitch explained... Because law enforcement is involved, Ulevitch was hesitant to release details of the actual target but there are signs that some of the targets were "nefarious domains" that have since been terminated.'" OpenDNS, which makes use of EveryDNS services, was affected for a time, until they spread their authoritative DNS more broadly. The EveryDNS site is now reporting that the attack is continuing but has been mitigated and is not affecting operations.
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EveryDNS Under Botnet DDoS Attack More

EveryDNS Under Botnet DDoS Attack

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  • puppy (Score:5, Funny)

    by Feyr ( 449684 ) on Saturday December 02, 2006 @09:07PM (#17085578) Journal
    /., like kicking a dead puppy.

  • COM != NET (Score:3, Informative)

    by 42Penguins ( 861511 ) on Saturday December 02, 2006 @09:07PM (#17085582)
    "The EveryDNS site is now reporting that the attack is continuing but has been mitigated and is not affecting operations." O Rly. I see it reporting a chunky man with bad hair holding an @. Please change link to everydns dot NET to continue the /. DDoS.

  • Affected; Irony (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Brendtron 5000 ( 973294 )
    This really made yesterday difficult for me.

    My comp sci networking class assignment was on my home server, and I use EasyDNS. Had to bus home and put it on a USB stick. Last day of class, and the end of a particularly brutal week.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by vk2 ( 753291 )
      There is your free lesson in redundancy [zoneedit.com]
    • Had to bus home and put it on a USB stick. Last day of class, and the end of a particularly brutal week.


      Save some time and punch in the IP address instead of a URL and skip the DNS lookup.
      It's your server. Do you know your IP address?

  • correct URL (Score:4, Informative)

    by barista ( 587936 ) on Saturday December 02, 2006 @09:11PM (#17085618) Homepage
    How about linking to the correct url [everydns.net]?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, if they are under a DDoS attack, there is no need to add salt to their wounds.
  • That while they attack them there'll be less spam?

  • Heh (Score:5, Informative)

    by davidu ( 18 ) on Saturday December 02, 2006 @09:26PM (#17085690) Homepage Journal
    The site is EveryDNS.Net [everydns.net].

    I'll keep it up for Slashdot, let me just move it around a bit. :-)

    -david

  • Link To Them (Score:2, Funny)

    by Iriestx ( 1033648 )
    Nothing helps out a site currently under a DDoS attack like being linked to on the front page of /.
  • Like people who kill attorneys willing to prosecute those in the mafia. If any phishers can be found, I hope they get jailed for life.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crush ( 19364 )
      It looks like this is nothing to do with phishers/spammers trying to attack phish tank. It's a vigilante action against "nefarious sites", whatever the fuck those are. It explains the sudden burst in "lame server" messages I saw in my logs anyway. I hadn't realised how many people were using EasyDNS.

  • Questions? (Score:5, Informative)

    by davidu ( 18 ) on Saturday December 02, 2006 @09:30PM (#17085718) Homepage Journal
    Since I've been getting a lot of questions from folks about EveryDNS, how we've been stable and around so long, how we dealt with this DDoS and how we manage to cover our costs I am writing a response that will probably be posted here on Slashdot tomorrow or Monday to answer all these questions.

    If you have questions about this or DDoS in general, feel free to ask them here and I'll make sure to cover them in my response. I'll be writing about what we've seen and what I generally do when it comes to soaking up traffic and how we handled this event in particular. (The short answer: find the smartest people you can to help you and then start taking corrective action)

    Thanks!

    David Ulevitch

    • Re:Questions? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Saturday December 02, 2006 @09:42PM (#17085796) Journal
      Because law enforcement is involved, Ulevitch was hesitant to release details of the actual target but there are signs that some of the targets were "nefarious domains" that have since been terminated.
      What does that mean?
      Was this a 'righteous' attack on malicious websites?
      Or just some intramural warfare by one nefarious group upon another?

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      1) Where were you getting hit from (country, areas...)?
      2) This might be harder to tell, but what type of clients were hitting you (high speed home users, commercial end servers)?
      3) The poster said " 'We were collateral damage,' Ulevitch explained..." How so, and who was the primary target?

      Its not all too bad, just 4 days ago, I found out about OpenDNS. Great stuff, gave me a solution to my horrible ISP's (Charter Comm.) DNS servers. And until I saw this post, I didn't know about EveryDNS. Hopefully this

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by daeg ( 828071 )
      You may not be able to disclose this, but how many zones do you support and under what type of operating environment (OS, DNS software)? You often see debates of statistics of which DNS can more easily handle a lot of traffic, but your service has another problem on top of bandwidth: volume of zones. Have you experimented with the various packages and setups?
      • The stats are on the front page of their site:

        Global Stats:
        Accounts: 62357
        Domains: 103552
        Records: 292615

        The implementation details are in the FAQ and About. Without bothering to read them again, I think they use a modified tinydns.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by daeg ( 828071 )
          I'll have to check again when this has passed, I couldn't get pages to load at work. Thanks.
    • I don't want this to come out the wrong way, but I know it'll probably get me flamed so I'll just spit it out. How exactly do you manage to go down from *only* 400Mbit/sec? No offense but that's not even a drop in the bucket in 2006 where it's commonplace to have a gigabit line running into one server. You guys really need to step back and take a look at your infrastructure if that's all it takes to go down. I realize this is somewhat a rhetorical question, to give you something easier to answer: What

      • Re:Questions? (Score:4, Informative)

        by davidu ( 18 ) on Sunday December 03, 2006 @02:37AM (#17087268) Homepage Journal
        4x400mbps == 1200mbps at times.

        That's less trivial to filter, especially when your upstream isn't being cooperative. In our case, which you'll read about tomorrow or Monday, we quickly were able to jump onto a network run by some folks with very very high levels of clue; nLayer operated by Richard Steenbergen. Their website is cheesy -- don't let it fool you. They are a seriously run network providing transit across the country to a bunch of other networks. Check routeviews for proof.

        -david
        • Our colo ISP (in San Jose) uses nLayer, and we ran into a problem where Verizon had a broken route to our east coast office for several weeks (looping between two Verizon routers.) Verizon was totally non-responsive, so nLayer manually advertised an alternate route that got things flowing again within a few minutes of reporting the problem.

          As a sidenote, everydns hosts macports.org which was affected by the DDOS. Even though macports also had two other working DNS servers besides the 4 from everydns, I had

    • Re:Questions? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Saturday December 02, 2006 @11:53PM (#17086496) Journal
      Bless you for offering to answer questions! That sort of cooperation is indispensable if security is going to improve.

      1. How did you manage the response? The one-smart-person-in-charge-who-stays-awake-the-who le-time approach? The small-team-with-independent-responsibilities model? The review-what-happened-at-shift-change model?

      2. What tactics worked, and even more important, what didn't work?

      3. What sort of agreements should people have in place with their upstream ISP prior to an incident?

      4. How intelligent was the attack traffic? Randomized payload? Does anyone bother spoofing addresses any more?

      5. Was it a guided attack or a fire and forget? In other words, did the scum make any changes to their tactics in real time as you tried corrective action?

      6. What if anything can be done in the first few minutes/hours?

      7. If you had to choose between capacity and filtering, which would you choose?
    • My domain whose DNS is hosted at everydns.net suffered briefly during this attack, but I didn't see any major problems. All the mail came through, for instance.

  • Real ripple effects, even from this small event. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Saturday December 02, 2006 @09:49PM (#17085830)
    A client (a pretty large retail chain) was using EveryDNS for forward lookups to the mail server's A record. Mail they were sending out started to bounce because receiving mail servers weren't happy when trying to validate the sending box. In once case, a vital piece of mail sent to a state taxing authority couldn't get through on a month-end calendar deadline, causing much grief. Yes, alternate communcations channels are always an option, but it wasn't immediately clear why the two mail servers in question appeared to be hating each other.

    Worse, the state government box's spam filtering appliance blacklisted the retailer's server, and a third party admin had to get involved to free things up. Quite a mess.

    But the real lesson? People who say that a "cyber attack" couldn't really hurt the economy are wrong, wrong, wrong. This stuff can be really disruptive, and this was a pissant little scaled-down example. No major damage, but a lot of thrashing around, untold manhours of lost productivity, and (in the case of the anecdote in question, involving just one retail company), probably some tax fines which will require much tail chasing to get waived once the the story is clearly told, assuming the state government in question is feeling sporting about it.
    • Your "ripple effect" sounds more like bad code on the side of the sites being effected. The protocol shoud be secure on a technical level and not rely on laws to protect it, because no matter how fascit you want the internet to be, you can never control it all.

      I could cause a lot more problems and not do anything illegal. Shoud those acts be illegal because of a butterfly effect caused by bad programming? Get real, please.
      • Shoud those acts be illegal because of a butterfly effect caused by bad programming? Get real, please.

        If by "bad programming" you mean: the DDoS attack on the name servers was working, and thus a receiving mail server couldn't decide whether to trust another party's sent message... then, sure. Except that's not bad programming "on the site" (as you put it), is it? No. It's a vulnerability in using DNS in the first place. The only thing that would have prevented that would have been sticking with good old

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bky1701 ( 979071 )
          DOS attacks are easy to pervent. And in this case, at least with your example, it could have been handled on the DNS's side server easy, had they known what they were doing. Stop hiding behind law to justify technical failures, the internet is survival of the fittist and that's just the way it belongs. (And lets not try to discuss how, if they can carry this out, you are going to catch them. It's pointless.)
          • Stop hiding behind law to justify technical failures

            I'm a little mystified at how you come up with this, but just to be clear: all I'm pointing out is that, as we sit, the proverbial "cyber attack" CAN indeed cause considerable economic disruption. I'm not sure what you think I'm hiding behind when I say that. It's just a statement of fact, and this one little event shows how disruptive it could be. I've made no particular call to action, but I certainly wouldn't mind if people who use bot-nets to cause

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Mixel ( 723232 )

            DOS attacks are easy to pervent

            Learn to spell, get a clue.

            There is nothing you can practically do to prevent someone on the internet from sending a packet addressed to you, nor two packets, nor 1000000. There is nothing you can practically do to prevent the source address on each of those packets to be different. If a DOSer has much bigger pipes than you, you are sunk, unless you can do something very smart. For a start, getting remote access to your server during a DOS attack is tricky unless you have re

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Qzukk ( 229616 )
            DOS attacks are easy to pervent.

            Prevent? How? "Don't hang out on IRC from your server's IP?" "When you get an email demanding $50000, pay up?" "Reach through the intertubes and strangle the guy that's about to send the packets to you?"

            They might be "easy to deal with": call your upstream provider and hope that they'll shut it off (or call their upstream provider) rather than go "kaching!" and let your bandwidth bill rack up.
          • Denial of service attacks are very difficult to defend against.

    • incompetence effects, not ripple effects (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Saturday December 02, 2006 @10:30PM (#17086064)

      In once case, a vital piece of mail sent to a state taxing authority couldn't get through on a month-end calendar deadline, causing much grief.

      Maybe a)it shouldn't be left until the deadline and b)sent via email, if it's so damn important.

      And maybe you not tell clients to use a free DNS hosting service as their sole DNS provider...

      • Maybe a)it shouldn't be left until the deadline and b)sent via email, if it's so damn important.

        Hey! I don't do management consulting for their accounting people. But sometimes this sort of thing tends to have that effect, once the dust settles.

        And maybe you not tell clients to use a free DNS hosting service as their sole DNS provider...

        Not my call on this one either. Our team is involved on a peripheral project, and this part of their infrastructure was in place long before we got on board. We've

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Forbman ( 794277 )
        you do not understand month-end processes, do you?

        In most/all companies, month-end and year-end are major periods of effort for accounting to close the books. Some of that includes communicating information with third-parties...

    • Who is the bright boy that put a spam filter on a a drop box for important tax info. This is the digital equivalent of the government refusing to accept mail and claiming you missed the deadline.
      • Who is the bright boy that put a spam filter on a a drop box for important tax info. This is the digital equivalent of the government refusing to accept mail and claiming you missed the deadline.

        I believe the official policy is that things are supposed to take place by postal mail, and FAX by fallback. But folks at both ends had been swapping mail for months with no problem (and more reliably AFTER the spam filtering went in), and got seduced into assuming it would always work. That's what happens, I see

    • They deserve the grief (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <pig DOT hogger AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday December 02, 2006 @10:57PM (#17086202) Journal
      In once case, a vital piece of mail sent to a state taxing authority couldn't get through on a month-end calendar deadline, causing much grief.
      That grief is well deserved. E-mail is **NOT** reliable, and delivery is **NOT**, **CAN NOT** and **WILL NOT** be guaranteed. So anyone stupid enough to entrust "vital" communication to e-mail rightly deserves to have his arse whipped real good.

      Myself, a month ago I missed an opportunity to collaborate on a TV miniseries. Why? Because the moron who asked me for my collaboration absolutely trusted e-mail, and it was **THE** message that bounced thanks to a network glitch, and that moron didn't think of calling me on the **PHONE**. Well, if they were stupid enough to trust e-mail like that, they probably would have made a crappy miniseries anyways.

      For casual communications, there is e-mail.

      For vital ones, there is registered mail, fax or phone.

      • For casual communications, there is e-mail.

        Yup. But when (in the case I'm citing) an accounting type and a person at a tax office have been happily swapping mail for many months, with little or no lag, they tend to get lulled into a sense of false reliability. And that's what happens.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 )
        Your example just goes to show that normal people do see email as reliable enough for important missives. And they are right; it gets to where it should be most of the time. Just like regular mail, by the way. They normally are both good enough for all but the most important messages.

        A lot of mail is misdelivered or just lost. Yet the tax people do not demand that we send in our tax returns by registered mail. And would you be as pissed at the miniseries people if they'd sent you a letter by regular m
        • A lot of mail is misdelivered or just lost. Yet the tax people do not demand that we send in our tax returns by registered mail. And would you be as pissed at the miniseries people if they'd sent you a letter by regular mail and the letter subsequently got lost?

          I'm sorry, this is slashdot. You are not allowed to use reasonable, constructive analogies to make a point. Also, you should sound just a little more hysterical, and be sure to somehow blame Steve Balmer if at all possible.

          Thanks, though! I sho
      • I totally agree, but isn't the state of affairs with e-mail really totally sad? I mean.. it's a digital form of communications that, by all rights, should be secure, guaranteed, and so forth. Instead, we have to use analog communications with either postal guarantees or real-time confirmation.

        Are there any e-mail style systems that do claim to be 100% fail-proof?
      • E-mail is plenty reliable if you engineer it to be so.

        Relying on a single third party DNS service is pretty stupid if reliability important.
        Redundant links, geographically and geopolitically dispersed DNS, careful administration.
        Engineer reliability between all important endpoints.

        Do that and you can send rather important things via e-mail and be confident that they will get there on time.

        Be sloppy and it's no better than relying on a cell phone with poor coverage, a weak battery, and a pre-paid plan.

  • "nefarious domain" is a loaded and subjective term (Score:5, Insightful)

    by plasmacutter ( 901737 ) on Saturday December 02, 2006 @10:04PM (#17085920)
    What is "nefarious"?

    to some.. the pirate bay and allofmp3 are "nefarious domains"..

    to others "www.f**Ktimewarner.com" and "walmartsucks.com" are "nefarious domains"

    and to others "www.wikipedia.org" and "www.aclu.org" are "nefarious domains".

    I have a lot of trouble with the idea that DDOS attacks were being carried out in (apparently successful) attempts to wipe domains off the face of the earth..

    this implies the attackers had no legal standing to take those domains offline.. then they call them "nefarious" after the fact.
    • dictionary.com defines nefarious as: "Infamous by way of being extremely wicked."

      What exactly being wicked would depend on the situation (as that's a subjective term) and considering that they are trying to take down websites via DDOS attacks, I'd call that wicked.

      Although, I don't understand your last statement. Is it wrong to call them nefarious after the fact? Wouldn't you call a person a murderer after they murder someone?
  • What reason could there be for botnet owners to attack EveryDNS? I can't see that they'd gain anything from it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ScentCone ( 795499 )
      What reason could there be for botnet owners to attack EveryDNS? I can't see that they'd gain anything from it.

      It's an indirect attack against people who use EveryDNS to get traffic to their own sites (or mail servers, etc). If you ran, say, an online casino, and your main competition for a particular type of customer happened to have EveryDNS doing their forward lookups... and you could shut down your competition for at least a full business day by torpedoing the DNS they need to be seen - presto, done.

  • Botnet? Cal it what it is! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Chris Tucker ( 302549 ) on Saturday December 02, 2006 @10:15PM (#17085984) Homepage
    Compromised Windows machines network.

    Where are the class action suits against Microsoft for continually producing such flawed software that makes it easy to 0wn a box?

    If it wasn't for 20 some years of MS indifference towards security, there wouldn't be botnets like this, being used for DDOS attacks and forwarding billions of spams a day.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ewl1217 ( 922107 )
      They're right here. [slashdot.org]
    • If it wasn't for 20 some years of MS indifference towards security, there wouldn't be botnets like this, being used for DDOS attacks and forwarding billions of spams a day.

      Uh, wrong. No software is completely secure, especially something as complicated as an operating system. This would still be happening, except it would be on Unix/OS2/Apple boxes instead of Windows. Get over it.
      • That's because Windows is so "user friendly." Unfortunately, what most users want to do with their computers is TOTALLY INSECURE.

        This of course doesn't help the remote exploits, buffer overflos [in file formats] and other problems that are totally native to MS [and go unfix for random amounts of time]. Not that bugs don't happen in the OSS world, but they tend to be fixed faster, and a larger portion of OSS users are more aware of secure computing practices [e.g. not running as root, not opening every f'i

        • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Since when is 'not user friendly' a feature? This smells like Microsoft marketing, but it's coming from OSS people now. We don't let people who aren't geeks use our software.

          Me, I'm a geek who uses Windows. I do computer fixes for a living, and I need to be intimately familiar with the systems my clients use, which are almost 100% Microsoft. Yet, despite running such 'inherently flawed software,' I haven't had a virus/trojan on one of my boxes. Ever. Turns out geeks are secure, regardless of what OS t
          • No, my point is Microsoft [and the ilk] make it too easy to get people in trouble.

            What's that? FreePartyPoker.net? All I have to do is download some random .exe from a server I've never seen before and run it as my DEFAULT ROOT USER? Awesome! [hint: most free poker games are spyware ridden ... and why aren't they just Java applications anyways?]

            So MSFT obliges them, running as root to avoid those pesky "user privilege escalation" prompts, ActiveX scripts and downloads (which the stupid users with no tra

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Phroggy ( 441 ) *
      Linux botnets don't get as much publicity, but they do exist; my own server fell prey once when I did something stupid, and I only found out about it when I got a spam complaint forwarded by my ISP.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 )
      Do we know that the botnet was the result of remote exploits and not the result of users explicitly downloading software that happened to be Trojanized? We can blame Microsoft for opening ports without need, having insecure software listening to those ports, and for making drive-by downloads possible. But if someone just insists on installing dancing cursors or weather forecasts, that's not Microsoft's fault.
    • ``Where are the class action suits against Microsoft for continually producing such flawed software that makes it easy to 0wn a box?''

      Can you say with certainty that whatever OS people would be using instead of Microsoft would have prevented this?
      • I can say for certainty that MS has, for decades, shipped an OS that was wide open to being easily exploited, via OS holes and two applications that begged to be used as vectors for virii, worms and trojans.

  • Open Letter to all Trolls (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis.gmail@com> on Saturday December 02, 2006 @10:17PM (#17085994) Homepage
    You're pricks.

    Nothing positive or lasting will come out of trolling (and yes: this means you anonymous asshats on /. and in usenet).

    So why not be part of a winning team and stop script kiddie'ing around from your parents basement.

    Sincerely,
    The Rest of the Human Race.
  • Did anybody else read this as "Every DNS Under Botnet DDoS Attack"?
  • After reading the updated article at Security Watch (http://securitywatch.eweek.com/exploits_and_atta c ks/everydns_opendns_under_botnet_ddos_attack.html) , I'm begining to think that the target of the attack was Phish Tank itself. Why else would a hacker or hackers launch such a large scale assault on one the worlds largest free DNS providing groups if only to knock them offline for only a few hours? I think that the domains in question are just cover for the attackers attempt at taking Phish Tank offline
    • Yeah I was thinking the same thing, after looking at phish tank it occurred to me that it's a list of phishing sites; I've written a little script called chimmer [slashdot.org] and chummer weighs in at about 120 lines of perl, that send phishers a lot of bad data to obfuscate the good data. The tools to make life miserable for phishers are really pretty simple and could easily provoke such a response; there is nothing really difficult or unique about chummer, so there have to be a lot of work-alike scripts out there in th
  • Hey all,

    I have to stress that it is EveryDNS that is under attack, and not EasyDNS.com [easydns.com].

    That being said this is not an uncommon issue these days at DNS providers across the 'net. Before anyone starts to kick and scream about how EveryDNS is handling things, remember that these attacks can get astoundingly vicious.

    No amount of "clue" or mitigation or whatnot will help when the upstream service providers themselves are having trouble with the traffic load from a large-scale botnet attack.

    • Re:Every DNS, not EasyDNS. (Score:4, Informative)

      by sirket ( 60694 ) on Sunday December 03, 2006 @01:01AM (#17086828)
      If your upstream provider can't handle 400Mbps of traffic then you're being hosted by a pretty shitty ISP/data-center. It's not like gig uplinks are expensive (even if you only commit to a tiny rate you can generally get gig uplinks). Spread this across 4 or more datacenters and you've got a lot of bandwidth.

      Not to mention that networking people generally don't give a shit about bandwidth- it's packets per second that kill routers, not bandwidth. Assuming 100 byte packets that's about 4Mpps- Even a basic 7600 can handle this kind of traffic. Assuming 30 byte packets (can't be smaller than that) you're talking about 15Mpps. Again Even a basic 7600 should be able to handle that- not to mention a Juniper M7i or similar. Most Foundry equipment would laugh at that rate. All of these routers can do ACL's at full packet rates.

      That said- other recent DNS attacks exceeded 1.5 Gigabits per second of traffic and were a lot more vicious than the attack being described here.

      I'm not knocking EveryDNS- I know what a bitch dealing with a DDoS can be- the problem tends to be that most people aren't ready to deal with it. Using BGP community based nullrouting most service can be restored within seconds of the target IP(s) being identified. That allows admins to keep untargeted systems and services up while the attacked systems are dealt with. The admins can then use the time to locate some/any pattern in the attack or enable the appropriate filtering such as a Cisco Riverguard or similar.

      -sirket
      • Oh believe me, I know how big these attacks can get ;) My thought on this is that considering some of the attacks we've seen recently I don't know if getting a 1Gbps pipe would have helped Every DNS, as the attacker probably would have just saturated that link as well. (especially if it's the same collection of botnets that attacked other providers).

        Attacks like this seem not to be targeted at taking the provider down forever technically, but making it so expensive for the provider to continue to operate

  • sue (Score:2)

    by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
    sue each participating machine owner for neglegence

    if you have a dog and it bites someone or damages someone's property you are liable, so why not computers?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by The Mysterious X ( 903554 )
      Because nobody has broken into the dog and forced it to bite somebody.
      • Because nobody has broken into the dog and forced it to bite somebody.

        The owner could be sued even if the dog has rabies.
      • Ok, so what?

        A. You allowed your dog to be in the open enough for someone to infect it.

        B. You refused to notice different behavior patterns in your dog (ie, he was slow to respond, seemed to be preoccupied every time you called him).

        C. You refused to take your dog to the vet often enough to notice this distemper, and he bit someone.

        You are liable. Replace dog with PC, and vet with "antivirus" and we're all good.

  • DNSPark, too (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mrmagos ( 783752 ) on Saturday December 02, 2006 @11:34PM (#17086412) Homepage
    I use DNSPark [dnspark.net], and they were subject to a DDOS attack earlier this week, too. Are they affiliated with EveryDNS too, or is it coincidence, since they are another cheap/free DNS host?
  • there wasn't a link to EveryDNS in the article.
  • I just want to say thank you publicly, you run a service that has helped out many folks, myself included.
    And a reminder, EveryDNS.net runs on donations.
    EveryDNS Donations [paypal.com]

    Thank you again.

    ps: Wow, slashdot uid 18.
  • Then it would be perfect.

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