Wide Open West DNS Attack & Fix
What happened at WOW Cable and how to fix the issue.
Wide Open West had said that the company’s DNS (or domain name) servers had been attacked by a distributed denial of service attack or DDoS. What this means is that the system that converts IP addresses (numeric IP value assigned to each web site) to a more user friendly system was unable to fulfill requests.
DNS stands for the Domain Name System. Name servers are the cornerstone to this system, acting like a phone directory for the internet.
Computers on the internet are connected by sets of numbers called IP addresses, for example, 184.154.1.124. While you see that this web site is www.LawrenceSystems.com, your computer see it as the number, 184.154.1.124.
The Reasons we use DNS are
- IP numbers are too hard for people to remember. I prefer type Google.com over 74.125.67.100
- Computers like IP numbers much better than names.
- DNS connects these two transparently – allowing people to use names and computers to use numbers.
- The numbers can change and the DNS insurers that the names always go to the right numbers
When you look at www.lawrencesytems.com, your browser asks a DNS “what’s the number for LawrenceSystems.com?”
DNS answers “184.154.1.124” and your browser connects to184.154.1.124.
So what happened?
The severs that Wide Open West provides for DNS were attacked in a way that rendered them unable to fulfill requests. A Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS attack, is the internet version of having a call center flooded with more calls than they can handle, but instead of coming from one sources that they could block, it came from many sources distributed around the intenet. As of now they do no know who initiated the attack or if it will happen again.
How do I fix it?
The solution is NOT to use the default DNS servers provided by Wide Open West. Here is how you change them.
Right Click on your network settings in the corner by the clock and choose “Open Network and Sharing Center”
Click “Change adapter settings”
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Then right click on your connection Local Area Connection for hard wired computers or Wireless connections for computers on WiFi
Choose “Internet Protocol TCP/IPv4” then click “Properties”
Once here you can put in the settings for OpenDNS 208.67.222.222 or 208.67.220.220 or Google DNS Servers 8.8.4.4 8.8.8.8
For this example I use OpenDNS and Google DNS just in case one of them goes down there will be a backup.
