Eircom DSL - DNS Lookups Slow

is eircom not an auzzie or new zeland company ?

time difference ?

Sully wrote: »

The type of compromise was not malicious, it seems. Every report has suggested that websites went to advertising portals - not fake versions of whatever website they visited. Its revenue generating.

john__long wrote: »

One guy I was chatting to on Twitter says his router can't acquire an IP address!

Anyone else finding this?

Federal Web sites hit hard by cyber attacks
Assault targets several agencies; South Korean sites also paralyzed

By Lolita C. Baldor

updated 12:01 a.m. ET July 8, 2009
WASHINGTON - A widespread and unusually resilient computer attack that began July 4 knocked out the Web sites of several government agencies, including some that are responsible for fighting cyber crime, The Associated Press has learned.

The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week, according to officials inside and outside the government. Some of the sites were still experiencing problems Tuesday evening. Cyber attacks on South Korean government and private sites also may be linked, officials there said.

U.S. officials refused to publicly discuss details of the cyber attack. But Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said the agency’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a notice to federal departments and other partner organizations about the problems and “advised them of steps to take to help mitigate against such attacks.”

She said the U.S. government sees attacks on its networks every day, and measures have been put in place to minimize the impact on federal Web sites. It was not clear whether other federal government sites also were attacked.

Others familiar with the U.S. outage, which is called a denial-of-service attack, said that the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

Korean attacks apparently linked
Web sites of major South Korean government agencies, banks and Internet sites also were paralyzed in a suspected cyber attack Tuesday. Ahn Jeong-eun, a spokeswoman at the Korea Information Security Agency, said the U.S. and South Korean attacks appeared to be linked.

The South Korean sites included the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, Korea Exchange Bank and top Internet portal Naver. They went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, Ahn said.

The Homeland Security Department's Kudwa had no comment on the South Korean attacks.

Two government officials acknowledged that the Treasury and Secret Service sites were brought down, and said the agencies were working with their Internet service provider to resolve the problem.

‘Massive outage’ detected
Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, called it a “massive outage” and said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.

Keynote Systems is a mobile and Web site monitoring company based in San Mateo, Calif. The company publishes data detailing outages on Web sites, including 40 government sites it watches.

According to Rushlo, the Transportation Web site was “100 percent down” for two days, so that no Internet users could get through to it. The FTC site, meanwhile, started to come back online late Sunday, but even on Tuesday Internet users still were unable to get to the site 70 percent of the time.

“This is very strange. You don’t see this,” he said. “Having something 100 percent down for a 24-hour-plus period is a pretty significant event.”

He added that, “The fact that it lasted for so long and that it was so significant in its ability to bring the site down says something about the site’s ability to fend off [an attack] or about the severity of the attack.”

Deluged by data
Denial-of-service attacks against Web sites are not uncommon, and are usually caused when sites are deluged with Internet traffic so as to effectively take them offline. Mounting such an attack can be relatively easy using widely available hacking programs, and they can be made far more serious if hackers infect and use thousands of computers tied together into “botnets.”

For instance, last summer, in the weeks leading up to the war between Russia and Georgia, Georgian government and corporate Web sites began to see denial-of-service attacks. The Kremlin denied involvement, but a group of independent Western computer experts traced domain names and Web site registration data to conclude that the Russian security and military intelligence agencies were involved.....

KoKane wrote: »

You still get the problem while on Open DNS?