Blue Security attack linked to blog crashes

Analysts believe this week’s DDoS attack on Blue Security was redirected to blog hosting company Six Apart, forcing it offline

A cyber attack that shut down anti-spam site Blue Security also felled thousands of blogs when the spam campaigner deflected the malicious hits onto its journal at blog host Six Apart, analysts said.

Internet security company Netcraft said on Thursday that Blue Security temporarily dealt with the distributed denial of service (DDoS) siege mounted by disgruntled spammers by redirecting traffic to its blog, knocking out Six Apart’s TypePad and LiveJournal services.

“The DDoS traffic appears to have followed www.bluesecurity.com to its new home, overwhelming Six Apart’s network and knocking its TypePad and LiveJournal services offline for nearly eight hours,” said Netcraft analyst Rich Miller in a blog posting.

In a DDoS attack, networks of compromised computers called botnets are used to repeatedly request information from a server or data centre. Such a barrage of requests means legitimate users cannot access the site, and can cause servers to fail.

The Blue Security redirection was first reported on the North American Network Operators Group mailing list on Tuesday. Six Apart did not speculate on the origin of the attack on Thursday, but hinted in an interview with ZDNet UK sister site CNet News.com that the problem was related to the content posted on one of its hosted blogs.

Full story: ZDNet UK