RSS news aggregator Feedly recently hit by distributed denial of service (DDoS) and attackers demanded money to restore service back to normal.
According to grahamcluley, it’s right not to give in to the blackmailers who are essentially running an extortion racket, demanding that the cloud service pay up or be taken offline with their DDoS attack.
The danger of paying DDoS blackmailers is that you’re only encouraging them to attack you more, perhaps increasing their financial demands next time.
Extorting money with threats against someone’s business is illegal of course, as is launching a DDoS attack against a website*. In the UK, denial-of-service attacks have been outlawed since 2006, and could result in the perpetrators receiving a prison sentence of up to ten years.
The RSS firm said on its website, "Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can.
However, while some DDoS attacks are often used as smokescreen for data theft, both Evernote, Deezer and Feedly have assured subscribers that, unlike recent attacks on eBay and Spotify, no user data has been pinched, and no action needs to be taken.
Evernote claimed, "As is the nature of DDoS attacks, there was no data loss, and no accounts were compromised," while Deezer said in its email that personal information "has been, and will remain, completely secure".
It’s a similar story in many other countries, and there are people who have been imprisoned for years as a result of their attacks.
Earlier this year, social site Meetup was hit by a DDoS attack whose perpetrators demanded $300 to restore access to the service. It also refused to pay.
