Evernote and Feedly Hit By DDOS Attacks And Blackmail

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Cyber criminals are becoming increasingly bold in the second decade of the 21st century. They’re not just trying to secretly hack into networks to steal information or money, they’re going so far as to blackmail businesses and individuals.

News aggregators Feedly and Evernote have been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack by hackers on June 10th and June 11th, and the attack on both is still ongoing as of the time of publication. A DDOS attack ties up the website’s servers with a flood of “zombie visitors” and prevents legitimate users from accessing website services.

The DDOS attackers sent both firms a blackmail message, saying they would cease the attacks if a payment was made. While there is no known connection between the two attacks, the news aggregator firms do typically work closely together.

Evernote attacked on Tuesday

Evernote was first attacked at 22:25 BST on Tuesday and was still ongoing as of the time of publication.

An Evercore spokesperson described the current situation. “We continue to mitigate the effects of the attack, but have successfully returned Evernote to service. As is the nature of DDoS attacks, there was no data loss, and no accounts were compromised.”

Evercore members were temporarily unable to synchronise their notes from one device to another when the attack began

California-based Evercore put out a press release in May announcing it had surpassed 100 million users.

Feedly attacked on Wednesday

Feedly, which as more than 15 million users, was first attacked on Wednesday morning, and users still cannot access website services as of 11AM ET today.

The news aggregator reassured users that no data had been compromised, and it was working closely with its network provider to return back to service as soon as possible.

“The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop,” company wrote in a blog post, “but we refused to give in.”

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