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Akamai Kicked Journalist Brian Krebs' Site Off Its Servers After He Was Hit By a Record Cyberattack (businessinsider.com)

Posted by msmash on from the pushing-the-limits dept.

An anonymous reader writes:Cloud hosting giant Akamai Technologies has dumped journalist Brian Krebs from its servers after his website came under a "record" cyberattack. "It's looking likely that KrebsOnSecurity will be offline for a while," Krebs tweeted Thursday. "Akamai's kicking me off their network tonight." Since Tuesday, Krebs' site has been under sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), a crude method of flooding a website with traffic in order to deny legitimate users from being able to access it. The assault has flooded Krebs' site with more than 620 Gbps per second of traffic -- nearly double what Akamai has seen in the past.

5 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. So basically ... the attack wins? by DavidRawling · · Score: 5, Informative

    Seems to me the attackers win, at least in the short term, because the caching and CDN provider (who I expect was probably contracted and paid, although it's entirely up to Brian how he handles his business affairs, it does seem likely) takes the site off the air anyway. That being the case ... what's the point of having that contracted relationship, if they dump you anyway?

    1. Re: So basically ... the attack wins? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Akamai were providing him service for free up to that point:

      https://twitter.com/briankrebs/status/779111614226239488

      So up to this point they had been eating the cost of hosting him and defending against attacks. This one just got too big for too long.

    2. Re:So basically ... the attack wins? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Before using terms like "shamefully", you really should know all the facts...

      Before everyone beats up on Akamai/Prolexic too much, they were providing me service pro bono. So, as I said, I don't fault them at all.

      — briankrebs (@briankrebs) September 23, 2016

  2. Idiots by edibobb · · Score: 5, Informative

    Akamai is throwing away a great marketing opportunity and turning it into a huge negative. Why would I move to Akamai, knowing that they'll kick me off their network if I ever have trouble? They're throwing away their primary competitive advantage with one stupid decision.

  3. Re:Akami folded, Kerbs is down by Sarten-X · · Score: 4, Informative

    too expensive to stand by their client

    He wasn't their (paying) client. He is a benefit to the infosec society, and was provided pro bono service in appreciation of and to assist his work.

    This attack probably cost Akamai a significant amount of money, so it's reasonable that they'd cut it off for a while.

    --
    You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.