CBR managed to get an interview with Blue Security’s CEO, Eran Reshef, to understand better how Six Apart became the unwitting victim of a spam war.
My CBR colleague in San Francisco, Kevin Murphy, covered the story for us. It’s one that affected many of us bloggers – it’s about Six Apart, which runs the popular LiveJournal and TypePad blogging services. Six Apart has become the collateral victim of a “very big, very sophisticated” denial of service attack mounted by a Russian spammer against an unrelated security company.
As Kevin writes:
The attack, which CBR can reveal was part of an extortion scam against users of Blue Security’s anti-spam software, caused hundreds of bloggers to complain about the downtime, during periods of intermittent blog access.
Six Apart told its millions of bloggers it had experienced “intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com”, before resolving the issue in the early hours of Wednesday May 3, 2006.
“He’s trying to rip apart the internet just to make our community stop fighting back against spam,” Blue Security’s chief executive Eran Reshef said of the spammer he believes launched the attack.
LiveJournal and TypePad found themselves suffering the brunt of the attack when Blue, which says it has been targeted by a “top four” Russian spammer, redirected the front page of its website to a blog hosted at TypePad’s data center.
“The major denial of service attack at TypePad was because of us hosting with TypePad,” Reshef told Computer Business Review.
TypePad general manager Michael Sippey told us that the company’s servers started feeling the DDoS at about 4pm US Pacific time on Tuesday May 2, and that it was still going on 24 hours later.
“From the pattern of attack it was unclear whether they were going after an individual blogger or going after us,” Sippey said. He described the attack as “very big” and said whoever the culprit is, “he’s very determined”.
You can read the rest of the story on our news pages here.