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Al Jazeera's web site - DDoSed or unplugged?
By John Lettice
Posted: 27/03/2003 at 16:17 GMT
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/29984.html
The launch of Arab satellite TV network Al Jazeera's new Web site on Monday drew
immediate hack attacks, but this has been swiftly followed up by the disappearance of
the site's DNS records. These now point to mydomain.com nameservers, but this
company's site is also currently inaccessible; as you might expect, under the
circumstances.
Al Jazeera (aljazeera.net, for the record) could have been taken offline by DDoS
attacks, but considering the timing one is also drawn to the possibility that
something involving a Big Red Switch might have been involved. Prior to the site's
complete removal company IT manager Salah Al Seddiqui told Reuters that its
Qatar-based vendor had said "US-based DataPipe could no longer host its site from the
end of this month," and that Al Jazeera would be moving its servers to Europe.
Al Jazeera had two listed nameservers - one at datapipe.com and one at nav-link.net.
NavLink has offices in the US (it's incorporated in Delaware), Europe and the Middle
East (the UAE and Lebanon), so there's a logic to Al Jazeera using it. However if the
dual-server system is intended to provide some form of resilience it clearly hasn't
worked.
The problem seems to have taken Al Jazeera unawares. When The Register spoke to the
company's London office earlier today they said that their most recent information
from Qatar had been that the site was unavailable because of heavy demand, and that
they were trying to get through to Qatar for an update.
Al Jazeera is not, as you will no doubt have noticed, universally popular, and today
in particular it has been heavily criticised by UK military spokesmen for screening
pictures of dead British servicemen. But even at the best of times the network is not
a customer that many hosting companies in the US would want to boast about. At the
worst of times - which probably includes now - it's unlikely the company would stand
any chance whatsoever of being accepted by US providers.
So it's perfectly possible that someone along the line decided, owing to pressure and/
or common prudence, not to continue involvement with the company. This sort of thing
might of course trigger legal action, but Al Jazeera itself is well-aware that it
treads a very tricky line, so probably won't want to make unnecessary waves. And as
its site was already pretty unavailable because of the attacks, and it's said it's
heading off to Europe, what difference would it make?
That you will note is one of two possible conspiracy theories, and does not
necessarily involve US.gov. But we expect that if the site hadn't disappeared already,
pretty soon US.gov would get involved until it did - which is conspiracy theory two.
The alternative to the conspiracy theories is that weaknesses in Al Jazeera's DNS
meant they were vulnerable to load, and that the disappearance of the DNS was
therefore a consequence of the attack. As we understand it, this is technically
possible, although it has also been suggested to us that the company's DNS did not
come under an insupportable load during the attacks.
So right now we think the jury is still out. But in the long run the question of
whether the company was DDoSed or unplugged will be fairly academic. Given that it's
pretty much unthinkable that it could have been allowed to continue running via US
companies, it was going to go anyway, one way or the other. Europe might be some form
of solution, but one might estimate that here too quite a few hosting outfits will view
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