Feedly buckles under DDoS but defies attackers’ extortion demands

News aggregator Feedly was made inaccessible by attackers who are demanding a ransom to stop their crippling assault. Two other cloud-based servers, Evernote and Deezer, have also buckled under distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in recent days.

Most or all of Feedly's 12 million or so users were unable to access its website early Wednesday morning. A few hours later, parts of the site gradually came back online. In an advisory, officials wrote:

2:04am PST – Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can.

We are working in parallel with other victims of the same group and with law enforcement.

We want to apologize for the inconvenience. Please know that your data is safe and you will be able to re-access your feedly as soon as the attack is neutralized.

On Tuesday, Evernote also experienced connectivity problems that it attributed to DDoS attacks. The service seemed to be working normally as of press time. Cloud-based music service Deezer suffered a DDoS attack over the weekend, according to The Inquirer, which cited e-mails company officials sent to subscribers.

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