Official Statement From Time Warner Cable re: Southern California DNS Outages

Over the past 7 days, hackers have launched a series of DOS attacks on Time Warner Cable's DNS servers, affecting customer experience in our Southern California and National regions. Subscribers in those areas would have seen intermittent "page cannot be displayed" errors as their DNS queries timed out. The outage did not result in DNS services being 100% unavailable; the outage was limited to sporadic timeouts which appeared to be random events.

These attacks are not uncommon, especially for a network as large as ours. However, this particular series of attacks has been larger and more difficult to contain than similar attacks in the past. We suspect that the attackers are using "zombie computers," or hijacking unsuspecting subscribers' machines to perpetuate the attack without its owner's knowledge.

As of 6PM EST on February 24th, we have amplified and expanded early detection and response to this sort of problem.

Customers who want to prevent their computers from being used in this sort of attack should make sure that their anti-virus and firewall software are up to date.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Please know that we are currently working with the help of law enforcement to bring these attackers to justice.

381 days ago : 5022 hits