February 16th, 2007
Massive DDoS attack KOs CastleCops
The anti-phishing community at CastleCops.com has been knocked out by a massive DDoS (distributed denial-of-service attack).
The volunteer-driven site, which is run by the husband and wife team of Paul and Robin Laudanski, had been coping with on-and-off attacks since February 13 but an intense wave that began around 3:45 PM EST today completely crippled the server capacity.
At 10:15 PM, despite industry-wide efforts at mitigation, CastleCops.com was still displaying a "Site Temporarily Unavailable" message.
"They got whacked real hard today. It was so strong that it knocked their ISP over," said a source involved in the scramble to mitigate the attack.
Law enforcement authorities are involved in the ongoing investigations.
CastleCops.com just celebrated its fifth anniversary as a high-profile anti-malware community. In partnership with Sunbelt Software, CastleCops.com runs the Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination (PIRT) Squad.
Ryan Naraine is a journalist and security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab. He manages Threatpost.com, a security news portal. Here is Ryan's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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