Reddit Hit By ‘Malicious DDoS’

Social news site Reddit claimed today to have been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack today, which is thought to have prevented users from accessing the site.

Some thought the site was sluggish because of the massive attention Reddit has been getting since the Boston bombings. Many had used the site in an attempt to uncover the identities of the bombers, and ended up accusing innocent people of being involved.

Reddit DDoS

“We’ve mitigated part of the DDoS at this time. However, certain site functions are disabled,” the most recent tweet from the Reddit status team read.

An earlier message read: “Site availability continues to be impacted by a malicious DDoS attack.”

Various users had complained over the Reddit Facebook page they could not access the site.

“The DDoS is still ongoing at this time, but we’ve taken steps to mitigate it. It is a significant outlier in comparison to what we’ve faced in the past. The primary target is the network layer,” Jason Harvey, senior systems administrator at Reddit, told TechWeekEurope.

Plenty of big name organisations have been knocked offline by DDoS attacks in recent days. Bitcoin, which Reddit accepts as payment, has been targeted. Mt.Gox, the biggest Bitcoin exchange, and the website of the Blockchain, which contains records of all Bitcoin transactions, were attacked just yesterday.

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