Blue Security Attack Crashes Six Apart Blog Network?
Six Apart’s TypePad blog network has come under the fire of a massive DDoS attack according to Six Apart’s Michael Sippey.
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. Our network operations staff is working around the clock with our Internet access providers to resolve the issue. We appreciate your patience and support, and will provide updates as we have them.
Apparently the Six Apart blog empire is in the green now, having taken care of the problem, but Security Pro News reports that blogger Jason Levine feels that the cause of the problem is an anti-spam security software, Blue Security, which has been the target of some spammers recently and has a blog running on Six Apart’s blogs.com:
Digging a little deeper, though, it doesn’t look like this is a particularly accurate description of what happened — but instead of this being a case of the folks at Six Apart trying to cover up some internal issue, it instead looks like they’re being far too gracious in not revealing more about another company, Blue Security, which appears to have been responsible for the whole disaster…
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.
Wonder how many blog netowrks are scrambling right now to see if any of their bloggers are rubbing spammers and hackers the wrong way?
I was looking at using blogging software before. Never really got into it. But I did get recommendations not to use MovableType because of spamming problems so I went for WordPress which handles them better.
I was using Blue Security for awhile. It was working great!
It’s unfortunate to hear such a tragedy for the company.
This was a bad decision by a great company that has been hitting spammers back and making them stop spamming Blue Community members. That’s why Blue Security came under attack–because their methods were working. Already 6 out of 10 top spammers have complied with Blue’s Do-Not-Include list. I hope people don’t get distracted by this one bad decision by the company, and instead focus on the real successes, the battles won. Now it’s time to win the war, and I hope people sign up in droves to achieve just that.
Fred aka the Blue Frog of Blue Security has been doing good work in reducing spam.
Then around Easter/Passover more junk started to come in. Then about 10 days later the threats from spammer(s). Shortly later the volume of spam went up dramatically for about 2 days. Things are getting back to normal levels.
I hope Blue Security is able to pick up where they left off after getting hit with a denial of service attack and being sabotaged by some irate spammer(s)
I like the Blue Frog’s system. It has worked well for me and any threats (only one received so far) just make me more dedicated to the program.
It’s pretty clear the spammers are behaving like terrorists. They want to scare people into behaving the way they want. Total crap.
Redirecting their homepage probably wasn’t a smart move on behalf of Blue Security, but give who they are and what they do, I’m more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Also, as so many sites have been collatorally damaged by the spammers, this is a clear wake-up call to much of the internet to the power that spammers have. I expect some useless legislation to come out of this, but I also expect some improvements, too.