Register.com a victim of DDOS attack

The Washington Post's Brian Krebs reports that web host and domain name registrar Register.com was the victim of a "target of a sustained attack this week, disrupting service for thousands of customers." The attack was a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, launched by a botnet of hundreds or thousands of compromised PCs, which caused a 3-hour outage for Register.com last week. It appears that Register.com has taken steps to resolve the problem, but in the process, they unfortunately lost some business from their customers. Web hosts and registrars like Register.com are often a target of hackers that seek to achieve economies of scale in their attacks. It is very important that web hosting providers, an important group in the Internet infrastructure ecosystem, maintain high security standards to protect themselves and their customers.