Alertpay DDoS'd

The world famous payment processor Alertpay has been under attack this Sunday. I would have posted this that very day, but I just got to the site today and saw what they had written there.

The site faced 7 hours of downtime, and then had to be shifted to another IP. The massive DDoS attack affected many businesses associated with Alertpay for payment processing. The attack was definitely a well planned attack, committed right in the middle of the christmas shopping season. This of course caused a loss to associated end users and businesses.

During the attack, the Alertpay authorities posted this message:

We are currently experiencing a large scale DDOS attack that has hit our sites which started at approximately 6:00am EST Sunday. We are working with our data center to resolve and/or mitigate this issue.

More information will be posted here as we get updates.

For the time being customers can connect to AlertPay at an alternate location:

https://67.205.87.226

Ferhan

Several hours later, after the attack was done, they posted another message saying:

We have finally mitigated the massive DDOS attack that started at 6:00am EST. Unfortunately it took almost all day to resolve. The site is operational now, and hopefully we'll continue to tweak it more tomorrow to ensure this doesn't happen again.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and we understand that this outage affects each of you personally. We’re sorry for that. We will continue to put measures in place so that outages like this do not occur again.

Ferhan

There is no doubt that such attacks will never stop. Of course, DDoS is unstoppable. But the sysadmins can without a doubt take precautionary measures like reducing waiting time etc. A similar incident happened in 2004 with Wordpay. DDoS attacks against payment processors have become very common nowadays. Is it competition of the companies, or just script kiddies playing around? Only they know for sure.

Call for hackers

This is an open call for all hackers worldwide.

k0r0pt The all new hacker ezine requires articles for the first edition. If you are a hacker, and you are interested in sharing your research and/or experiences with other hackers of the world, then do write.

To take a look at the Editorial Policy, visit http://k0r0pt.co.cc/main.htm.

Blog shifted back.

This blog has been shifted back here. I landed into this decision, because I rarely write about hacking and exploration anymore, because I do not get much time. Also, I have started another hacker ezine, which is called k0r0pt. Information about this can be found at http://k0r0pt.co.cc. The magazine needs writers. So, if anyone is reading this blog entry and is willing to write for the magazine, please be directed by the Editorial Policy there.

And about this blog, I will still continue to write here, probably more about explored sections of hacking, that I come to know. About my further research in those fields, well you can see them in the magazine.

Till then, enjoy exploring and remember, hacking is fun!

We have moved

This blog has been shifted to the new official k0r0pt website's blog at http://k0r0pt.co.cc/blog. Do check it out, because the new posts and all my research from now on, will be posted on this new blog.

New blog and podcast

It seems that my research has taken a break. Seems a long one to me. But when I do start my explorations again, I shall upload them here. Till then, I have started another blog about Open Source softwares, hardwares and their tweaks. The blog is located at: http://opensourcethefuture.blog.co.in. It accompanies a Podcast with it. I shall be more than happy if you could visit that and enjoy. I'll continue with this blog again, very soon.