R.I.U. Star Patrol launch DDoS attack aimed at Tumblr

Dec 23, 2016 08:13 GMT  ·  By

Tumblr is the latest online service to go down after being targeted by hackers, with a large DDoS attack causing an outage that lasted for nearly 2 hours.

Mashable writes that Tumblr first went down at 3:15 PM ET (10:15 GMT + 2), when many users reported slowdowns and latency. Soon after that, Tumblr became available before going down once again a few minutes later, as the attack continued.

Tumblr confirmed the issues in a short tweet, but provided absolutely no indication that the company might be dealing with a DDoS attack.

“Some users are experiencing latency affecting the dashboard. We’ll get it fixed ASAP,” Tumblr tweeted before announcing 2 hours later that the service has been restored. “Okay! Everything's fixed, and Tumblr is back to its usual self. Apologies for the interruption, and thanks again for all your patience.”

“Just for fun”

Hacking group R.I.U. Star Patrol has already claimed the attacks, pointing out that it did it for fun and not to steal any information or tweet malicious links. And this is actually the purpose of DDoS attacks anyway, as they’re only supposed to take targets offline for a specific period of time.

“We are claiming responsibility for the Tumblr outage,” the group tweeted. “Attacks stopped on Tumblr this was the final wave of ddos attacks against the service for now,” they added nearly two hours after launching the first attack, allowing Tumblr engineers to restore access to the service.

What’s more surprising, however, is that Tumblr, although it originally acknowledged the latency and the issues that users experienced when trying to access the service, removed all tweets when service was restored for a reason that’s not yet known.

At the moment, everything seems to be running normally on Tumblr, but the company’s refusal to acknowledge the hack might have repercussions in the future, when similar and longer DDoS attacks could be launched against the service.