14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, RSS reader service Feedly went through a distributed denial-of service (DDoS) attack that took hours to neutralize. Evernote, the popular service that lets users take notes across platforms and which integrates with Feedly, has also gone through a similar problem.
While many have speculated that there was a connection between the two attacks, there’s no proof of that. However, security company Incapsula mentions that this may be a sign of things to come.
Marc Gaffan, co-founder and chief business officer of Incapsula, has told Softpedia that the entire incident may be just a prelude to the main event.
“The attacks on Feedly and Evernote are important and troubling all on their own. However, that they were executed in the same week that Anonymous announced they were prepping a widescale attack on FIFA’s World Cup sponsors is even more troubling,” Gaffan said.
He explains that often, prior to large attacks, hackers will engage in preliminary attacks to “flex their muscles,” which guarantees that when the real strike comes, all resources are working at their highest capacity.
“Further evidence of this is that some of the official government sites we work with have seen an escalation in DDoS activity in the last week. What we’re seeing with Evernote and Feedly might just be a prelude to the real show,” he says ominously.
DDoS attacks are increasingly more common nowadays. Incapsula’s recent report on such attacks indicates that in the first three months of the year, the company’s network was hit by 12 million unique DDoS bots each week, while the number of DDoS bot visitors has increased by more than 240 percent during the last 12 months.
As mentioned, Feedly went through a big DDoS attack yesterday that rendered the service inactive for several hours as the company mitigated the attack.
“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 said. Security experts advised against giving in to the ransom requests in order to discourage such practices and that is exactly the path chosen by Feedly.
“We refused to give in,” Feedly’s team wrote, adding that the company was working alongside network providers to fight against the attack. Even so, it took several hours until the threat was neutralized.
DDoS attacks aim to take down servers by swamping them with useless data that can no longer be processed. While this may be annoying, at least users have no reason to fear for their data in such circumstances.