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Uniregistry says it was unaffected by mother of all DDoS attacks

Kevin Murphy, October 25, 2016, 13:26:21 (UTC), Domain Registries

Almost 50 top-level domains were believed to be exposed to the massive distributed denial-of-service attack that hit Dyn on Friday, but the largest of the bunch said it managed to stay online throughout.
As has been widely reported in the mainstream and tech media over the last few days, DNS service provider Dyn got whacked by one of the biggest pieces of DDoS vandalism in the internet’s brief history.
Dyn customers including Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, PayPal and Reddit were reportedly largely inaccessible for many US-based internet users over the space of three waves of attack over about 12 hours.
The company said in a statement that the Mirai botnet was likely the attackers’ tool of choice.
It said that “10s of millions” of unique IP addresses were involved.
It has since emerged that many of the bots were actually installed on webcams secured with easily-guessable default passwords. XiongMai, a Chinese webcam manufacturer, has issued a recall.
In terms of the domain registry business, only about 50 TLDs use Dyn’s DynTLD service for DNS resolution, according to IANA records.
About half of these are tiny ccTLDs. They other half are Uniregistry’s portfolio of new gTLDs, including the like of .link, .car and .photo.
Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling told DI that the Uniregistry TLDs did not go down as a result of the attack, pointing out that the company also uses its own in-house DNS.
“We like Dyn and think they have a great product but we did not go down because we also run our own DNS,” he said. “If we relied on them exclusively we would have gone down, but that is why we don’t do that.”

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