Raspberry Pi hit by DDoS attack

The Raspberry Pi Foundation website was hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack on its website late on Tuesday evening.

The organisation announced the attack on Twitter, as shown below.

We're being DDOS'd at the moment - very sorry if you can't see the website. If it goes on, we'll try to get some more capacity in tomorrow.

— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) March 5, 2013

It also admitted that it was not the first attack seen on its network and that the nature of the attack was quite sophisticated.

For those interested, this one's quite hardcore: we're seeing a SYN flood from a botnet that seems to have about a million nodes.

— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) March 5, 2013

This is the second attack in a couple of days. We haven't had the blackmail email yet. It's getting plonked when it arrives.

— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) March 5, 2013

V3 contacted Raspberry Pi for more information but had received no reply at the time of publication.

Jeremy Nicholls, Arbor Networks channel director for Europe, said the attack proved firms should be wary of the threat from DDOS attacks and to make sure they had measures in place to protect against the risk.

“It’s sad to see the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charity with a good cause at its heart, has been the focus of a vicious attack. This stunt goes to highlight the unfortunate fact that any organisation, of any size and nature, is vulnerable,” he said.

“Every company that relies on internet availability to do business should be seeking to invest in prevention against DDoS attacks as well as implementing a mitigation strategy should the worst happen.”

Raspberry Pi recently celebrated its one year anniversary as tech-lovers and schools have shown keen interest in the device.