UK's Largest Hosting firm 123-Reg 'Pounded' by DDoS Attack

This is the second time in two years that 123-Reg suffered a series of massive DDoS attacks.

UK’s largest domain registrar provider 123-reg has become a victim of a DDoS attack after which its users couldn’t access their email accounts as well as websites. This is only the beginning of 2017 and the hosting platform has suffered another big blow.

The news about these attack was announced formally by the company via Twitter:

“We believe a DDoS attack has just started, we are working out remediation options and impact at present. Updates to follow.”

“Our networks teams are continuing to scrub and reroute bad traffic. We apologize for any inconvenience during this time. Our teams are continuing to reroute traffic. A further update on this work will be provided very shortly.”

The attack occurred on Friday and the company claimed its IT staff was able to mitigate the attacks since the services of the site were resumed by 1 pm. But, even today some of the users complained about not being able to access their websites.

Here are two tweets sent out by 123 Reg to their customers:

We believe a DDoS attack has just started, we are working out remediation options and impact at present. Updates to follow.
— 123 Reg (@123reg) January 6, 2017

The DDoS attack was resolved at 1pm. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.
— 123 Reg (@123reg) January 6, 2017

Last year, 123-Reg was attacked with two major distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, one in April and second in August 2016. The company admitted that “small number” of user data might have been lost after the April attack. The users of 123-reg were quite annoyed back then since even after full-fledged efforts, the company only managed to get back only “39 percent of the VPS’s (Virtual Private Servers)” back online after almost a week. In August, 123-reg was affected severely by a massive 30Gbps DDoS attack after which the website went down completely.

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Last year, French-based OVH hosting also suffered DDoS attacks up to 1Tbps. The company also highlighted the use of Mirai botnet malware in the attack however 123 Reg did not reveal further information.