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Akamai Kicked Journalist Brian Krebs' Site Off Its Servers After He Was Hit By a Record Cyberattack (businessinsider.com)
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.
I don't blame Akamai at all and it sounds like Krebs doesn't either. There were a ridiculous amount of resources used on the attack and that shit gets expensive to block.
The reason is irrelevant. The message is clear: You want to silence your opposition? Conduct a DDoS until your enemy's hoster decides that you're more hassle than he is worth.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They weren't hosting him for free, there's no such thing as free.
They were hosting him because it was good PR for them to be able to say "Yeah, we're capable of holding up this high value target's website just fine regardless of all the attacks he regularly comes under".
This is a tacit admittance that Akamai's business model has changed from high end bulletproof host to just another host that will not keep your site up in the face of a DDOS. This is rather unfortunate for them, because such low end hosts are widely available, and at a far lower price point.
I wish them luck with their new model as just another host chasing the low hanging fruit. They've sacrificed an incredibly important unique selling point for them - their reputation as a host that will keep you going no matter what.