Categories: OLD Media Moves

Tech security site knocked off internet

Tech security site Krebs on Security run by Brian Krebs has been knocked from its servers after a massive attack, reports Paul Szoldra of Business Insider.

Szoldra writes, “‘It’s looking likely that KrebsOnSecurity will be offline for a while,’ Krebs tweeted Thursday. ‘Akamai’s kicking me off their network tonight.’

“Since Tuesday, Krebs’ site has been under sustained distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, a crude method of flooding a website with traffic to deny legitimate users from being able to access it. The assault has flooded Krebs’ site with more than 620 gigabits per second of traffic — nearly double what Akamai has seen in the past.

“To put it more plainly: It’s the digital equivalent of jamming a bunch of gunk into a drain pipe. Eventually, water won’t be able to pass through.

“Websites targeted by this type of attack typically go down for a short period and then come back online. And for hosts, the attacks mean shifting resources to different servers to mitigate the damage.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.