Just like governments across the world do not negotiate with terrorists, the social networking website Meetup.com has refused to pay the small ransom its hacker has been asking for.
Meetup.com has been experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that began Thursday and continued through Monday afternoon and caused the social network to be offline most of the time. The hackers demanded $300 to stop the massive assault, but the website refused to settle.
DDoS attacks are meant to bring websites offline by pushing a volume of traffic that will be impossible for its servers to handle.
The co-founder and CEO of Meetup Scott Heiferman received a warning via email Thursday morning with a subject line "DDoS attack, warning."
"A competitor asked me to perform a DDoS attack on your website. I can stop the attack for $300 USD. Let me know if you are interested in my offer," the body of the email read.
"Simultaneously, the attack began, our servers were overwhelmed with traffic, and our services went down. We got to work mitigating the attack, but we remained unavailable for nearly 24 hours," Heiferman shared in a blog post.
A flurry of DDoS attacks followed Saturday afternoon, Sunday evening and on Monday. The company stated that data of organizers and members are all secure, including information about their credit cards. It also said that no data was accessed or stolen.
"We made a decision not to negotiate with criminals. The extortion dollar amount suggests this to be the work of amateurs, but the attack is sophisticated. We believe this lowball amount is a trick to see if we are the kind of target who would pay. We believe if we pay, the criminals would simply demand much more. Payment could make us (and all well-meaning organizations like us) a target for further extortion demands as word spreads in the criminal world. We are confident we can protect Meetup from this aggressive attack, even if it will take time," the company listed its reasons why it did not pay the pocket change demanded by the attacker.
Meetup is a network that encourages people to establish local communities for self-improvement or to help their own communities. It has been up for more than 12 years and the DDoS attack was its first ever since it was established.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has started an investigation to find the criminal group or individual who might be responsible for the attack.
