AlertPay brought down by DDOS attack
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
An online payment company was rendered helpless after a large DDOS attack knocked it out for seven hours this past Sunday.
The website AlertPay.com announced it was hit by the attack on Sunday and provided customers with an alternate location to conduct their business.
Yesterday, AlertPay posted this statement: "We have finally mitigated the massive DDOS attack that started at 6 a.m. EST. Unfortunately it took almost all day to resolve. The site is operational now and hopefully we'll continue to tweak it more tomorrow to ensure this doesn't happen again."
The timing of the attack appears to coincide with Cyber Monday, the online equivalent of Black Friday where users can benefit from online shopping deals.
The Zdnet security blog suggested two possibilities for who could be responsible for the DDOS attack on AlertPay.
One could be a rival website to AlertPay employing unethical competition in an effort to gain more of the market during a time of "international economic meltdown."
The second could be cybercriminals in "revenge mode" and possibly attacking the website after being caught doing "fraudulent activity."
Since 2004, there have been at least six DDOS attacks against online payment websites.
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