Companies working to fully restore their services

Jun 11, 2014 14:02 GMT  ·  By

In a post on the company's blog, Feedly announces that their servers have suffered a distributed denial-of service (DDoS) attack.

An update was published a short while ago saying that the infrastructure is modified so that the online service is restored.

Using Twitter as communication channel, Evernote, the popular note-taking service that integrates with Feedly, informed their followers of a similar problem, but later on, the company managed to restore services, which are up and running at the moment.

Evernote did not publish other details about the attack, but Feedly informed that the purpose of the service disruption was money extortion.

“Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop,” the company says.

Security experts advise not to give in to ransom requests in order to discourage criminals from such practice; and this is exactly the action Feedly took, as their technicians worked to restore functionality of the service and cooperated with law enforcement to determine the group behind the attack.

“We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can,” says the initial blog post.

Users should not fear about personal details being compromised because the purpose of distributed denial-of-service is to bring down servers by bombarding them with useless data, which, at one point, can no longer be processed by the server.

However, such activities can disguise a different type of attack, as was the case with GameOver ZeuS botnet used by cybercriminals to distract victims from noticing a cyberheist.

[UPDATE, June 12]: Feedly made a new post on the company notifying users that the attack has been neutralized and that services are functional on all supported platforms. Updating all users (40 million) may take a few hours, though.

If you are still not able to access feedly.com it may be possible that the computer is caching an old DNS entry. Flushing the DNS solves the problem.