Starhub, Singapore’s 2nd largest mobile and broadband operator DNS server was overwhelmed by traffic resulting in outages for over the weekend. Till today, it’s Facebook page is flooded with complains asking for help and some are asking for a refund for it’s services.

Starhub on Tuesday (Oct 25) finanlly confirmed that their servers were attacked by high traffic in a form a Distributed Denial of Service attack.

The Singapore Computer Emeergency Response Team (SingCERT) has published an advisory on 26 Oct following the attack on the telco on 24 Oct.

As for end users are not IT savvy, they are unable to browse the web, watch the cable TV over the IP network since the clients (PCs, set top boxes) are all issued with IPs pointing to the Starhub DNS servers.

In fact, the simplest way to bypass this issue is to change the DNS settings at the router level so that home connected devices will get the Google DNS or OpenDNS. That should be able to resolve the URL addresses to IP address.

In a DDoS attack, the malware would reside in IP devices check as wireless printers, webcams etc. They are simply sitting there waiting to attack a particular network or servers in a fast and furious way from all different locations.

It is advisable to change the default admin password of such devices once it is installed.

Were you affected by the days of outage ? Willl you be switching telcos or ask for a refund for the downtime? Discuss.

By Harry