You do understand a DDoS attack on major DNS sites is not a specific attack on this site, right?
ummm
OK, I'll explain:
Websites have numerical addresses in the format xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. These are hard to remember so to make the internet more user-friendly people came up with word names for websites like 930.com or yahoo.com. Every computer that is connected to the internet needs to connect in the background to a service that looks at the word name, also called the domain name, (e. g. 930.com) and translates it into its numerical address (in this example 98.138.253.109) automatically for you. This service is called a DNS (domain name server).
Most people do not know this service exists because its provided automatically by their ISP. Hypothetically anyone can start a DNS but because most people are not tech savvy they use their ISP's default or major ones like Google's public DNS (8.8.8.8.)
So, if you're a hacker and you want to cause the biggest impact possible, how do you do that? You could attempt to flood every single website on Earth with so many requests they crash (a "DDoS"), but this would be a huge technological feat. Or, you can do that same flood-attack but target the handful of major DNS (Google's, comcast's, verizon's, etc) that 98% of people use without knowing it and if you take those down, then that 98% cannot translate the domain names into the numerical addresses
causing the practical effect of making websites appear down
but without ever actually attacking the website itself. (I am somewhat oversimplifying how a DNS works - its a chain of computers, not one solitary computer. They're attacking one link in the chain, basically.)
In other words, if this is causing you issues in reaching the club's site, the hackers are not targeting or attacking TicketFly's server (which the club's website is hosted on), its an unintended consequence of them making address resolution go down. The website is still there, untouched; your computer just lost its guide to figure out where it is.
This has been Julian Explains a 9th Grade Computer Class to Bad Hombres, the lowest-rated local access show in the country.
