Since last week a massive Denial of service attack (DDOS) hit major internet services in an attempt to bring the service down.
Companies like Wix, StatCounter, Namecheap, Meetup and Bit.ly where the target of an unprecedented large scale and sophisticated DDOS attack.
In an email sent to Wix customers Avishay Abrahami, Wix CEO, explains about the attack:
"Since Thursday, 2/27 at 07:00am EST Wix has been the target of a malicious DDoS attack, a technique used by hackers to take an internet service offline by overloading its servers. (To read more about DDoS attacks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack). We have robust systems in place to deal with such instances; however the scale of this particular attack caused Wix.com and some Wix user websites to experience significant but intermittent downtime. Throughout the attack, we were able to guarantee that the vast majority of websites remained live and unaffected. Rest assured, all your personal data, including billing information, is secure and was never compromised."
StatCounter announced via Twitter that they managed to restore the service after is was down.
Some of the companies got a blackmail letter asking for money in order to stop the attack such as published my Meetup.com, however they did not surrender to the blackmailer and trying to fight off the attack.
The DDOS attack started around the same time on 2/27/2014 for most of the services being targeted which raises the suspicion that it is the same group of criminals attacking all of these companies, trying to blackmail them for money. It is unknown if and how many other companies did pay out the ransom money and avoided being hit.
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