An attack in early February on key parts of the backbone of the internet had little effect, thanks to new protection technology, according to a report released this week.

The distributed denial-of-service attack on the Domain Name System (DNS) proved the effectiveness of the Anycast load-balancing system, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said in a document published on Thursday. ICANN regulates internet domain name and address registration and operates one of the main so-called root DNS servers.

"The internet sustained a significant distributed denial-of-service attack, originating from the Asia-Pacific region, but stood up to it," according to the ICANN document, which attributed the internet's fortitude to Anycast's routing of traffic to the nearest server.

DNS serves as the address book for the internet, mapping text-based domain names to the actual numeric IP addresses of servers connected to the internet, and vice versa. A distributed denial-of-service attack seeks to bring targeted servers down by sending an onslaught of traffic from multiple sources, typically compromised PCs.

The link for this article located at CNET News.com is no longer available.