123-Reg has not had a great start to 2017, with the hosting provider hit by yet another distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The attack has reportedly left customers unable to access their accounts and websites.
123-reg disclosed the attack on Friday 6 at midday, tweeting to confirm that they had been once again hit in a cyber attack. 123-reg did appear to act quickly, with services back up and running by 1pm.
However, critics are questioning why after previous attacks, the company is still 
vulnerable to such attacks. Stephanie Weagle, VP at Corero Network Security, argues that waiting for an attack to happen is foolhardy, even more so for hosting providers who are popular targets of hackers.
“Hosting providers are at increased risk for DDoS attacks impacting their network environment and their hosted tenants, due to the number of customers they service and the aggregate Internet peering bandwidth they utilize. An attack on a single tenant of the provider can create major collateral damage to other hosted customers. These innocent bystanders are placed in the unfortunate situation of suffering from second-hand damage because they are hosted on the same shared facilities as the intended victim, and the results can be devastating for both the provider and their customers.
“Waiting until the attack has occurred to determine steps toward remediation is too little, too late. Providers can proactively eliminate DDoS attacks from impacting their network, and their customers with real-time DDoS detection and mitigation technology, implemented at the peering edge.”
This latest attack follows two major attacks which hit the firm in 2016. A glitch in April ‘effectively deleted’ some of its customers, while the August attack saw the company fall victim to a massive 30Gbps DDoS attack.
