An extortion scam against a security firm's anti-spam software was behind the recent attack on blog publisher Six Apart.An extortion scam against a security firm's anti-spam software was behind the
recent DDoS attack on Six Apart, which suffered intermittent problems for 12 hours yesterday.
The original distributed-denial-of-service attack was directed by a spammer known as PharmaMaster against Blue Security, an anti-spam firm based in Israel, according to a press release from that company.
According to a report in Computer Business Review, Blue Security attempted to deflect the attack by redirecting its home page to point to its blog, which is hosted on Six Apart's TypePad service.
"PharmaMaster ruthlessly ordered a massive, sophisticated DDoS attack against any site associated with Blue," said Eran Reshef, CEO of Blue Security. "This attack caused five top-tier hosting providers in the United States and Canada, a major DNS provider and a popular blog site to go down for several hours."
The press release did not mention that Blue Security pointed its domain name at its TypePad blog.
"How's that for honorable comportment," read a post on the North American Network Operators Group listserv. "We're getting slammed so we're gonna make it someone else's problem."
Representatives from Six Apart refused comment.
The attack, which began around 7 p.m. EDT, caused intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com.
Click here to read about Six Apart's enterprise blogging tools.
Anil Dash, Six Apart's vice president, said May 3 that he didn't know the reason behind the attack, but speculated that it could have been directed against a single blog or group of blogs in retaliation for objectionable content.
"A lot of bloggers would like to think they're important enough to be hit with a denial-of-service attack," Dash said.
According to security expert John Pescatore, of Gartner, in Stamford, Conn., however, attacks against blogs have become less common in the last few years.
"Several years ago denial-of-service attacks went against sites the attackers were annoyed with," he said. "But the past few years DOS attacks have been cyber-crime-related, to make money. You don't make money knocking down a little blog or two."
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