Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Filtrbox Hit By DNS Issues

Boulder-based Filtrbox, which is venture backed by Flywheel Ventures and True Ventures, told its users this morning that the firm's service was hit by collateral damage from a denial of service (DoS) attack on its DNS hosting provider, Dotster, early this morning. The firm said that its service were made unavailable around 2:00am today, after Dotster's DNS servers were attacked by an unknown hacker. Filtrbox provides a service which monitors online news, blogs, and social networks for information on companies and brands. Dotster had resolved the issue as of 7:00am, but new DNS information was still being propagated to users, making Flickrbox's site still unable to some. DNS servers are used to direct Internet users to the correct web sites, and have been increasingly under attack by hackers using them to either steal user information or to deny access to web sites; local Denver startup Secure64 is one of the companies which have been looking to help companies prevent issues with DNS, with their own version of a hardened DNS server.