Normal services have been restored after a "ferocious" distributed denial of service attack was launched against Doncaster-based hosting firm Donhosts today.

The attack started in the early hours of today and forced Donhosts to take one of its Web hosting servers offline for two hours.

Web sites hosted on this server were unavailable during this time; however it was still possible to deliver email to affected clients. Web, FTP and control panel services on other servers were unaffected by the attack.

The assault is the latest DDoS attack on UK ISPs which as Donhost managing director Daniel Conlon points out are difficult to defend against.

"We have firewalls up to our ears and access control lists on our routers but even then these distributed attacks are difficult to cope with," he said.

In recent days both Basingstoke ISP Cloud Nine and Tiscali UK have been subjected to DDoS attacks. Both the motive and source of these attacks remains unclear but their increasing prevalence this year is becoming a source of concern. ®

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