Many large e-commerce sites hobbled by cyber attack

A DDoS (Distributive Denial of Service) attack hobbled many large e-commerce sites.

An attack directed at the DNS provider for some of the Internet's larger e-commerce companies -- including Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Expedia -- took several Internet shopping sites offline Wednesday evening, two days before Christmas.

Neustar, the company that provides DNS services under the UltraDNS brand name, confirmed an attack took place Wednesday afternoon, taking out sites or rendering them extremely sluggish for about an hour.

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