Al Jazeera's
web site - DDoSed or unplugged?
By John Lettice
March 28, 2003
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 Al Jazeera as a poisoned chalice,
a customer with a profile several notches to high.
And even if it does get itself
sorted out on the other side of the pond, it will still be likely to
gain experience of how much of the Internet, when it comes down to it,
is actually US-owned. But perhaps it has some cards. US companies wanting
to play in the Middle East are unlikely to find their local operations
going down a storm if they're refusing to do business with a popular
TV station like Al Jazeera, so they'll be pressured in both directions.
That's the trouble with the Internet - it connects things that sometimes
you'd rather didn't get connected.
This article originally appeared
in The
Register