 "LinkedIn back up after hour-long outage following DNS issue")
If you tried to access LinkedIn early in the morning today, chances are you would be redirected to a domain sales page. LinkedIn, one of the biggest professional networking sites in the world, went down yesterday in the US (today morning for Indian users) for an hour while battling a DNS issue.
According to DownRightNow, the outage, which affected most of LinkedIn’s members, started out when the networking site’s homepage was switched with a domain sales page. This service break started out at 6:30 AM IST.
LinkedIn goes down for an hour following DNS issue
While the reason for this breakdown could be varied, App.net co-founder Bryan Berg was quoted saying that LinkedIn’s DNS was hijacked, and that the site’s traffic was sent to a network that was hosted by Confluence Networks. In his post, Berg also said, “They don’t require SSL, so if you tried to visit, your browser sent your long-lived session cookies in plaintext.” LinkedIn, which is now back online, posted on Twitter earlier in the day saying that the site was going through some issues and that it has been confirmed that it is a DNS issue.
What is DNS, you might ask? DNS is short form for Domain Name Service (or system), which is an Internet service that converts domain names into IP addresses. Domain names are easier for users to remember because they use alphabets. The Internet, however, functions on IP addresses. Thus, each time a user looks at a domain name, a DNS service must translate the name into the respective IP address. The DNS system works as part of a network as well, so for example, if one DNS server does not know how to translate a particular domain name, it will ask another server, which will ask another and so on, until the correct IP address is worked out.
LinkedIn was replaced by a domain sales page for an hour (image credit: thenextweb)
Thus, an outage occurs when the right IP address is not generated for the domain name. DNS hijacking, which is what Berg is saying happened, occurs when a malware is used to override a computer’s configuration to look in the direction of a rogue DNS server which is under the control of an attacker. This is done for varied purposes like phishing, or by Internet service providers (ISPs) to rope in users’ web traffic for their own web servers to provide advertisements and gather data.
The DNS outage has come in the wake of another attack a little over a year ago, where the business networking site confirmed that almost 6.5 million of its user passwords were stolen and subsequently uploaded to a Russian hacker server.
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