Social networking portal Meetup has been hit with a prolonged distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that has caused intermittent outages for days.
At the time of this report, the site was not available.
According to a blog post by the company, the DDoS attack initially took place on Thursday morning, causing its website and apps to be unavailable to its members. While service was partially restored later in the day, another wave of malicious traffic knocked the website offline Saturday evening.
The Meetup team once again managed to restore service for “most people” in the early Sunday hours, but it was once again affected by the attack in the evening.
Throughout the incident, the company has stressed that no sensitive information was been affected.
“Organizer and member data is secure, including credit card information,” the company post reads. “No data has been accessed or stolen.”
This has been the longest downtime the company has experienced in its 12 years of operation, according to a blog post by Meetup Co-founder and CEO, Scott Heiferman.
In his address to Meetup members, he shared an email from the attacker who attempted to extort the company prior to conducting the DDoS attack.
“A competitor asked me to perform a DDoS attack on your website,” the criminal wrote. “I can stop the attack for $300 USD. Let me know if you are interested in my offer.”
The attack began shortly after receiving the message.
According to Heiferman, Meetup did not pay the “ridiculously small” fee because it did not want to negotiate with criminals and felt that judging by the amount that was asked, the attack, although sophisticated, was the work of amateurs.
He believes that succumbing to the threat would have only led to a higher demand in the future, as well as additional attacks since “word spreads in the criminal world.”
According to a report by TechCrunch, Meetup has confirmed that it has enlisted the help of CloudFlare, a San Francisco-based security and site performance service provider, to mitigate the attacks.
CloudFlare recently battled a massive NTP reflection DDoS attack that “peaked just shy of 400 [gigabytes per second],” according to CloudFlare CEO, Matthew Prince.
Source
Meetup battles prolonged DDoS attack
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The following article is a update:
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http://betanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/DDoS-attack-600x398.jpg
Yes, I know, on Tuesday we reported on a study showing that DDoS attacks were down in frequency, though increasing in severity. But another report from Corero Network Security now suggests that they've actually increased in numbers.
Measuring the number of DDoS attacks is beginning to look like asking how long a piece of string is. Anyway, Corero says that attacks are up with its customers experiencing attack 3.9 attempts per day.
It also finds that they're getting more sophisticated in an effort to evade security measures. Corero’s data points to two new trends in DDoS attacks, short bursts of attack traffic instead of prolonged events, and partial link saturation attacks rather than completely flooding the network. Around 96 percent of attacks targeting Corero’s SmartWall Threat Defense System lasted for 30 minutes or less.
full article
************************************
DDoS attacks are up -- and getting more sophisticated.
By Ian Barkerhttp://betanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/DDoS-attack-600x398.jpg
Yes, I know, on Tuesday we reported on a study showing that DDoS attacks were down in frequency, though increasing in severity. But another report from Corero Network Security now suggests that they've actually increased in numbers.
Measuring the number of DDoS attacks is beginning to look like asking how long a piece of string is. Anyway, Corero says that attacks are up with its customers experiencing attack 3.9 attempts per day.
It also finds that they're getting more sophisticated in an effort to evade security measures. Corero’s data points to two new trends in DDoS attacks, short bursts of attack traffic instead of prolonged events, and partial link saturation attacks rather than completely flooding the network. Around 96 percent of attacks targeting Corero’s SmartWall Threat Defense System lasted for 30 minutes or less.
full article
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