A distributed denial-of-service attack that affected thousands of customers at Codero and other hosting providers appeared to come from within China and to be launched at a Chinese site that is critical of communism or its Domain Name System provider, Codero said today.
The disruptions that took Codero's customers offline for most of the morning were collateral damage in the attack, Ryan Elledge, chief operating officer at Codero, told CNET.

Directly in the path of the attack was a Codero customer that hosts DNS records for sites on the Internet, including a Web site critical of communism that appeared to be the ultimate end target, he said. At least three other hosting providers for that Web site were also affected by the attack, he said. Elledge declined to name any of the companies involved or the Web site.

Meanwhile, all of Codero's customers were back up by 1 p.m. PT, according to Elledge.

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