Controversial Israeli security company
Blue Security has
been under siege from spammers for the past few days.
The company's business websites had been under a sizeable denial of service
attack for a number of days, it emerged over the weekend. The most likely
attackers are spammers angered at the firm's aggressive tactics.
Blue Security has been offering a tool for download to members of its 'Do Not
Intrude' registry since last year.
The
Blue
Frog tool traces and floods senders of unwanted email with opt-out mails, a
technique that has been likened to spamming itself.
But members of the registry received threatening emails from the spamming
community last week, warning them to quit the service.
A large-scale distributed DoS attack was underway shortly after. At some
points, Blue Security reckons it was being flooded by around 10 million packets
a second.
Guy Rosen at Blue Security emailed the
Sans Internet Storm Centre
giving a breakdown of the week's activities.
"Monday: Spam-based threats and accusations; Tuesday: Our website is cut off
from outside Israel by a mysterious routing change; Later on, huge DDoS lashes
out at our servers; DDoS continues as we relocate our service to bring it back
up. One estimate was of something of the order of 10 million packets/sec coming
in," he wrote.
However, at one point it emerged that Blue Security had drawn yet more
concern from other areas of the industry by seeking to dodge the DDoS attack.
The company reinstated an old blog and then rerouted its DNS to the blog
address. The weight of the attack apparently brought down the entire blogging
services of TypePad and
LiveJournal.
Do you agree?
Have your say on this article