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The Blue Frog fight with a Russian spammer claimed an innocent bystander. TypePad and other sites operated by Six Apart came under attack from a sophisticated DDoS, the company posted on its blog.
Michael Sippey wrote in that entry how Six Apart was being affected by the DDoS, which began on May 2nd:
Since approximately 4:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time, Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack. This has affected all of Six Apart's sites, causing intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com.
After nearly twelve hours, Six Apart finally sounded the "all clear" and set their network status back to green. However, it appears Six Apart never should have been victimized in the first place.
In a lengthy blog post, Jason Levine wrote that Six Apart's woes could be laid at the feet of Blue Security, the Israeli firm that developed the Blue Frog anti-spam tool.
Blue Frog floods spammers with opt-out or complaint messages when they email users who are members of the Blue Frog Registry. One particularly persistent Russian spammer has been retaliating against the company with those DoS attacks; in fact, Blue Security is completely unavailable as of press time.
Levine thinks Blue Security was responsible for the whole mess. So why did this happen? Levine explained on his blog:
Because according to a post on the North American Network Operators Group mailing list, at some point yesterday the people at Blue Security decided that the best way to deal with the attack was to point the hostname www.bluesecurity.com to their TypePad-hosted weblog, bluesecurity.blogs.com. This effectively meant that the target of the attack shifted off of Blue Security's own network and onto that of Six Apart, and did so as the direct result of a decision made by the folks at Blue Security.
Judging from the outage, it's unlikely that Blue Security gave them any warning...
About
the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer with WebProNews and SecurityProNews. |
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