{"id":586855,"date":"2025-03-13T17:32:20","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T15:32:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=586855"},"modified":"2025-03-16T11:30:30","modified_gmt":"2025-03-16T09:30:30","slug":"co-za-under-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/586855-co-za-under-attack.html","title":{"rendered":"CO.ZA under attack"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

South Africa’s country code top-level domain (ccTLD), .ZA, is facing a denial of service attack, ZA Registry Consortium executive for registry operations Jerry Maleka has told MyBroadband.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MyBroadband was contacted by several Internet and hosting providers on Thursday who said they were seeing errors when trying to resolve CO.ZA domains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was after several PretoriaFM listeners in Europe reported on Saturday that they were struggling to access the radio station’s online live stream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People in Poland, Switzerland, Germany, and the United States reported intermittent problems getting to South African websites using CO.ZA domains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At our request, the users tested sites like Takealot.com (working), MTN.co.za (error), MTN.com (working), Vodacom.co.za (error), and Vodacom.com (working).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the problems on Saturday appeared to resolve on their own, they cropped up again on Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Downdetector showed a spike in outage reports, including at OpenDNS and Google Public DNS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, an industry source said that the problem affected many domain name system (DNS) servers, not just those hosted by OpenDNS and Google.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DNS is a critical Internet protocol that translates Internet domains like mybroadband.co.za into the numbers that routers and servers can understand. It can be thought of as the phone book of the Internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another industry source told MyBroadband that two of the DNS servers powering the .ZA namespace had stopped responding on Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result, caching servers like Google’s were returning DNS resolution errors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It caused mayhem,” they said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problems began earlier in the afternoon on Thursday, and once again appeared to resolve themselves an hour or two later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Downdetector showed a spike in outage reports on Thursday, 13 March 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Denial of Service Attack<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

South Africa’s ccTLD infrastructure is managed by an organisation called the ZA Registry Consortium (ZARC). Currently only certain second-level TLDs are supported, like co.za, net.za, org.za, and web.za.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZARC is a joint venture with DNS Business \u2014 not to be confused with the DNS protocol \u2014 which handles the technical infrastructure of the .ZA zone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZARC’s registry operations executive, Jerry Maleka, confirmed that they had been experiencing problems since 6 March 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Currently our teams are investigating, but it seems like we’re having a denial of service attack,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A denial of service attack is typically where a flood of network traffic is directed at a server to overwhelm it, preventing it from responding to legitimate traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maleka said they are trying to isolate the attack and will provide further feedback as soon as possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The infrastructure for South Africa’s .ZA domain names has been under attack for almost a week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":586857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[68154,19564,11815],"class_list":["post-586855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-domain-name-services-dns-business","tag-domain-name-system-dns","tag-neil-dundas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586855"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586855"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":587086,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586855\/revisions\/587086"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/586857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}