Confirmed: Time Warner Cable users impacted by DDoS attack

When users of Time Warner Cable systems report issues concerning slow broadband performance affecting a wide region, they've been happy to see prompt responses from JeffTWC -- one Jeff Simmermon, who's the company's New York-based Director of Digital Communication. In recent days, though, Simmermon's Twitter feed has been exploding with complaints.

As it turned out, there's a serious reason for concern, as Simmermon explained in a longer-than-Twitter post late yesterday: Time Warner Cable systems are the apparent target of an orchestrated denial-of-service attack.

"Over the past 7 days, hackers have launched a series of DOS attacks on Time Warner Cable's DNS servers, affecting customer experience in our Southern California and National regions," reads the statement served by A Long Reply. "Subscribers in those areas would have seen intermittent 'page cannot be displayed' errors as their DNS queries timed out. The outage did not result in DNS services being 100% unavailable; the outage was limited to sporadic timeouts which appeared to be random events."

Simmermon authenticated his comments to Betanews this afternoon (his name actually had not appeared in the actual reply, so we were the first to validate it, he told us). He was unable to provide specifics at this time about the nature of the attack, which is disabling some but not all DNS requests, in what appears to be a random pattern.

"These attacks are generally uneven," he told us. "Some users will get a total lockout, some will get a slower browsing experience. It's sort of random." Simmermon added that he believes customers have a right to feel upset about diminished service, which is why TWC is doing all it can to mitigate the problem, including some measures we may only hear details about after a successful outcome.

Simmermon's longer-than-Twitter reply stated that the company did start implementing serious countermeasures early Tuesday evening, describing them as "amplified and expanded early detection and response to this sort of problem." He has not been told, however, whether those countermeasures may generally slow down customers' throughput in the affected areas.

"Whoever these people are that are perpetrating this attack, they're not just raising the ire of the corporate bigwigs," Simmermon said, echoing the frustration he's seeing from customers on Twitter and elsewhere. "They're affecting everybody's experience. It's not just frustrating to companies; it's affecting real friends, real neighbors, everyone who uses a computer."