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Meetup Threatened With Extortion

By TechTaffy Desk

meetup

Social meetings site Meetup has been available intermittently since Thursday, following repeated DDoS attacks. Scott Heiferman, co-founder and CEO, Meetup, says he received a threat from hackers, and shares the extortion email in a blog post. 

Date: Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 10:26 AM
Subject: 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 hacker(s) demanded the princely sum of $300 to stop the DDoS attack, which they said was being instigated by a competitor. Mr. Heiferman says the company chose not to pay the money because they did not want to negotiate with criminals. Even though $300 seemed a ridiculously small amount, he says the attacks were extremely sophisticated, and paying the criminals could incite them to simply ask for more.

Meetup had several hours of downtime over several days, a first in the company’s 12-year history. There were over 60,000 meetups during the outage period.

[Image courtesy: Meetup]

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