ICANN | DNS Attack Factsheet

DNS Attack Factsheet 1.1

8 March 2007

Download the DNS attack factsheet 1.1 here [PDF, 289K].

ICANN has today released a factsheet concerning the recent attack on the root server system on 6 February 2007. The factsheet is intended to provide an explanation of the attack for a non-technical audience in the hope of enlarging public understanding surrounding this and related issues.

Aside from covering the attack itself and the engineers' response to it, the factsheet also briefly reviews the root server system, the domain name system, Anycast technology, and what can be done in order to deal with such attacks in future.

It is hoped that the factsheet will be the first in a series, with ICANN's general manager of public participation, Kieren McCarthy, acting as series editor. Future factsheets hope to follow a similar approach of providing clear and topical non-technical information about various aspects of the Internet in which ICANN is involved.

We welcome whatever feedback the community may have, plus suggestions for future factsheets. Please post any comments you have on the related blog post. This factsheet is released under a Creative Commons licence.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers