Domain aftermarket and parking service Sedo was hit be a distributed denial of service attack on February 12 and 13.
The DDoS attack hit many sites parked on Sedo’s nameservers. The attack prevented access to most of Sedo’s Name Server-parked domain names for about 45 minutes on February 12 until Sedo was able to block the attack with the help of its hosting provider. The attack continued on February 13 for 12 minutes. Sedo is compensating its customers accordingly. In a letter to its customers, Sedo CEO Matt Bentley wrote:
We apologize for the inconvenience caused by these malicious attacks, and our conducting a thorough investigation to hold the responsible party accountable.
To prevent the re-occurence of such attacks in the future, Sedo has recently closed an agreement with the world’s leading provider of DDoS attack prevention services. This should protect us from all but the most catastrophic of attacks, and as always we stand by our policy of compensating users for all downtime, regardless of whether or not Sedo was at fault.
Given the amount of money Sedo’s parking service pulls in it’s not surprise that they will pay to prevent another one. DDoS attacks at parking services are nothing new, and Sedo itself has been subject to them in the past.
In other Sedo news, the company has added “IDN” graphics next to domains with non-roman characters:
This is likely because of user confusion. Depending on your browser and language plugins, IDNs can look very similar to english language domains. If domainers are confused by this, you can bet the web community as a large will be fooled by IDNs (read: phishing attacks to come).
Dave Wrixon says
I don’t know why Sedo bother doing IDN. They cannot even cover all the Latin scripts let alone the non-Latin scripts, which is what this is primarily all about?
Sedo what is the point?
I will leave you to work out where the intonations should lie in that last sentence.
Jesse says
I wrote about exactly this issue on my site, IDNcyclopedia.com. Let’s not paint all IDNs with the same brush, shall we? The fact is, there are domains, be they IDN or ASCII that are reg’d to be sold in bad faith.
The fact that Sedo has let this practice continue is outrageous and proves once again who they are looking out for. I’ll give you a hint: it isn’t their customers…