Feedly Kills DDoS After Denying Extortion Attempt

Popular news aggregator service Feedly has fought off a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, hours after it declined to pay the perpetrator to stop the barrage.

Feedly said it had repelled the attack late last night UK time, having warned users the DDoS had taken it offline in the morning. The attackers had sent notice they would only stop hitting the service if they were paid – a common tactic amongst such criminals.

Feedly fights DDoSers

“The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can,” read a blog post early yesterday from Feedly.

“We are working in parallel with other victims of the same group and with law enforcement.”

The company said later in the day it was working with its network providers and ops team to tweak its infrastructure to deal with the waves of traffic being launched at Feedly.

A further update noted the DDoS had been dealt with. “Our ops team is closely monitoring the situation in case the attacks resume. It might take a few hours for some of the 40 million feeds we poll to be fully updated. We would like to re-iterate that none of your data was compromised by this attack.”

Cloud productivity software provider Evernote had also reported a DDoS attack on its network on Monday.

DDoS attacks have been growing in size over recent months, hitting a peak of 325Gbps, when a hosting service in France was hit. Amplification techniques, where attackers spoof the IP of their target, send small requests to servers that generate massive responses and watch the epic traffic take out the victim.

How well do you know Internet security? Try our quiz and find out!