You may have noticed that your Dot TK Website
was recently down. This downtime has been the
result of a massive Internet (DDOS) attack on the
Dot TK root servers. Although we have made the
required changes in our network to get everything
back up again, we wanted to briefly explain
what happened.
As you may know, when someone wants to visit a
.TK website, his computer first contacts one of
the three Root Servers of Dot TK. One of the Root
Servers is located in San Francisco, and the other
two are in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. There are
more than 400,000 domains registered with Dot TK.
Websites bearing the .TK extension and those sites
are visited more than 40 times per second by people
all around the world. DDOS attacks are attacks on
computer networks whereby packets of information
are sent through the Internet to one or more destinations,
in this case: the Root Servers of Dot TK.
This attack resulted in the immediate non-availability
of all 400,000 Dot TK websites, which use the .TK
extension including the Dot TK registry website
www.dot.tk.
This was such a large attack that The Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) in the United States is thoroughly
investigating the attack, IP address by IP address,
since one of the Root Servers is on US soil.
Also the Criminal Investigation Service of the Dutch
law enforcement is working on the case.
You can review the Press Release on the attack by going to:
http://www.dot.tk/vc00401.html
The good news is that together with ICANN, the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers,
which deals with policies of Root Servers on
the Internet, Dot TK has found a solution.
The Root Servers of Dot TK are back online since
April 2nd 2003. Due to the "propogation" of domains,
it took some more time to get back "up" again. At
this moment, everything is working again and all
domains should be available.
We apologize for any inconvenience this downtime may
have caused you and assure you that we have done
everything possible to get all Dot TK sites
up and our network protected.
If you have questions or remarks about this attack,
please email
[email protected].
Regards,
Dot TK System Management
