As regular readers know, this site was unreachable for about 8 hours the other day. We weren't alone as all Typepad subscribers were affected as well as all other services provided by SixApart. Apparently, Russian spammers were behind the whole thing. This comes on the heals of last week's DOS attack that shut down the blogs over at Hosting Matters and was carried out by Saudis.
An Israeli antispam company said Thursday that a junk e-mailer's vendetta is behind attacks this week that took down its site, five hosting providers and one of the internet's largest blog networks.
The website of Blue Security, a service that sends automated opt-out requests to e-mailers identified as spammers, has been down since Tuesday, shortly after users began receiving threatening messages from a purported junk mailer.
Company officials said a spammer who goes by the name "PharmaMaster" and is believed to be based in Russia orchestrated attacks that brought down its site and those of several firms affiliated with Blue Security.
"He basically bribed somebody at a top-tier ISP," said Eran Reshef, Blue Security's founder and CEO. "He was basically able to breach into the backbone of the internet."
Reshef described the initial attack as "the opposite of a denial of service," in which a target site is overwhelmed with incoming packets of data. PharmaMaster, according to Reshef, made sure that traffic could not get to the site, which is "something that the backbone can do."
Following the attack on the Blue Security site, Reshef said, PharmaMaster carried out a distributed denial of service attack against sites associated with the company, causing the targeted hosting firms, a DNS provider and the blog site Six Apart to go down for several hours.
Six Apart, whose network includes blogging sites TypePad and LiveJournal, confirmed that its site was down for about eight hours beginning Tuesday afternoon. Spokeswoman Jane Anderson said the site's temporary inaccessibility was the result of a criminal act, but did not specifically attribute it to a spammer's vendetta against Blue Security.
According to Reshef, PharmaMaster took credit for the attacks in an instant message conversation.
"He basically said, 'I'm going to get you off the net,'" Reshef said.
PharmaMaster's attack spree comes as 2-year-old Blue Security claims to be making dramatic progress in stopping spam. The company said that six out of the top 10 spammers worldwide have stopped sending spam to its half-million registered users.
"We hope it's the last gasp of a dying fish," said Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor and former Clinton administration privacy adviser who sits on Blue Security's advisory board, of the latest battle. Swire attributes the spammer's ire in part to Blue Security's success in blocking spam.
That's essentially what PharmaMaster has concluded, according to Reshef, who said he received an instant message reminiscent of Blue Security marketing copy: "Blue found the right solution to stop spam, and I can't let this continue."
Blue Security's website was still inaccessible to U.S. users Thursday afternoon.
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