UltraDNS Corp, which provides DNS services for the likes of oracle.com and top-level domains including .info and, from January 1 2003 .org, was hit by a DDoS attack unprecedented in its scale.

While no services were actually denied, the attack has got the company concerned enough to boost its bandwidth and infrastructure to prevent further attacks. UltraDNS CEO Ben Petro compared this kind of attack to "terrorism".

Petro told ComputerWire that even though the company has seen DDoS attacks before, its network was "really, really, really tested" for the first time. The attack became apparent at about 9am US Pacific Standard Time and ended three hours later.

UltraDNS has about 40 servers distributed around the globe, using BGP anycast to share the same two IP addresses. Each server saw enough traffic to fill up more than one T1 pipe during the attack's peak.

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