[Infowarrior] - Cyberattack knocks millions of blogs offline

[Richard Forno]

Cyberattack knocks millions of blogs offline

By Joris Evers
http://news.com.com/Cyberattack+knocks+millions+of+blogs+offline/2100-7349_3
-6068344.html

Story last modified Wed May 03 16:50:15 PDT 2006

About 10 million LiveJournal and TypePad blogs were offline or barely
reachable for several hours on Tuesday as the result of a massive
denial-of-service attack.

The attack started at about 4 p.m. PDT, targeting the popular blogging
services and the corporate Web site of their provider Six Apart, company
vice president Anil Dash said in an interview Wednesday. Service was back to
normal at midnight, according to Six Apart's Web site.

"Any large service tends to have a pretty constant level of attacks, but
this was on a scale that I don't think anybody could have anticipated," Dash
said. "I think it is of a scale that would have impacted any large site on
the Web."

In a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack the target is overloaded
with requests for information. The requests come from a large number of
hosts, typically compromised computers. As a result, legitimate users can no
longer access the site.

Six Apart intends report the attack to the authorities, such as the FBI, but
hasn't done so yet, Dash said. "We have not yet had the time to think about
the next steps yet," he said. The San Francisco company has some theories on
the origin and motivation of the attack, but Dash declined to speculate.

Unlike large online businesses, Six Apart isn't typically the object of
large-scale onslaughts, Dash said. If it does face an attack, often the
problem is related to the content posted on one of the blogs it hosts, he
said.

Six Apart's main hosting facility is in a large data center located at 365
Main in San Francisco. The attack morphed as the blog company tried to
respond, making it more challenging to deal with.

"They were changing pretty rapidly," Dash said. "We have learned enough that
if it does happen again, we know what to do."

Six Apart plans to make amends to its customers, but has not yet decided
how. Late last year, when it had some performance issues, it let its users
decide how they wanted to be compensated, Dash said. "We will definitely do
whatever makes things right for them," he said.