The Federal Communications Commission in the US has confirmed that it experienced multiple distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the weekend.
Analysis from the regulator found that the series of attacks first began at midnight on Sunday, targeting the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to its commercial cloud host.
The DDoS attacks, which the FCC says were committed by “external actors”, made it difficult for legitimate commenters to “access and file real comments".
Although the system remained up and running for the whole time, the DDoS attacks nevertheless tied up servers, preventing them from responding to people attempting to submit comments.
In a press release, Dr. David Bray said the FCC has “worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward".
There is currently no indication that these attacks have compromised any data.
The news comes shortly after the regulator found itself in the firing line on comedian John Oliver’s show Last Week Tonight, on the back of chairman Ajot Pai’s plan to scale back net neutrality rules.
Oliver was hugely critical of those proposals, urging viewers to visit gofccyourself.com, which directs users straight to a page where they can file comments to the FCC on net neutrality.
The FCC’s website was found to be down over the weekend after the episode had aired, with speculation suggesting that it was due to the increased volume of traffic, before the FCC’s announcement.
DDoS attacks are proving to be an increasingly pressing problem for many businesses and can have hugely damaging financial consequences.
A recent study from Neustar Research found that a DDoS attack could cost companies an average of $2.5 million in revenue.
Unsurprisingly, the same study also found that many organizations are subsequently doing their best to invest more resources into defending their systems, with 90% of companies set to spend more money on safeguarding against DDoS attacks.
