DoubleClick Recovers From Web Attack

DoubleClick says it has fully recovered from the Internet attack suffered Tuesday, which caused service disruption to the company’s ad serving clients.

According to measurements from Keynote Systems, DoubleClick’s ad servers sustained performance problems between approximately 9:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time, resulting in slowdowns and outages to popular Web sites.

“Our engineers worked tirelessly throughout the day to resolve the problem as quickly as possible, and it has been permanently resolved,” said Jenny Connorton, a DoubleClick spokesperson.

DoubleClick attributed the incident to a denial-of-service (DoS) [define] attack targeting the company’s DNS [define] infrastructure.

DoubleClick said that during the four-hour outage, most of their 900 ad serving customers were affected. Keynote’s performance and availability testing identified sites belonging to the Wall Street Journal, Charles Schwab, CNET, CNN, and Gateway to be among the hardest hit.

The DoubleClick attack was likened to one that affected Akamai on June 15 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:45 p.m. Eastern Time. Akamai said the domain name service impact was limited to approximately 4 percent of its customer base of 1,100 total customers under long-term service contracts.

Daniel Berkowitz, director of corporate communications, Keynote, said that the attack “seemed be a significant one as many sites on the Keynote Business 40 Internet Performance Index showed availability issues.”

Google, Alta Vista and Lycos all suffered sporadic performance issues on Monday from the MyDoom virus, but they seemed to be unaffected by the DoubleClick attack. MyDoom v2 exploited the search capability for the major engines, returning server busy errors.

The recent spate of attacks are not expected to be isolated incidents, unfortunately. “In terms of anticipating more attacks, we can’t predict the future, but based on the regular occurence of these kind of events, we can assume more will happen,” said Berkowitz.