Last week renowned cyber security journalist Brian Krebs’ website, Krebs On Security, was hit with a record cyber-attack and taken off line.
Everything turned out O.K. for Krebs, as tech. giant Google stepped in to help out. Krebs On Security was hit with a massive DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. Akamai stated that the attack was the biggest one that they have ever seen.
Google helped Krebs get back online by stepping in with their little known program, Project Shield. Shield helps to protect independent journalist and activist websites from censorship. The attack hit Krebs’ site after he reported on a site called vDOS, which Krebs stated was created by two Israeli citizens that commit cyber-attacks for paying customers.
After Krebs’ report went public, the men behind vDOS were arrested, and the site was shut down.
“Why do I speak of DDOS attacks as a form of censorship? Quite simply because the economics of mitigating large-scale DDoS attacks do not bode well for protecting the individual user, to say nothing of independent journalists,” Krebs’ report said.
Through it all Krebs never blamed Akamai for pulling his site because the company was hosting his site for free, and the giant DDoS attack didn’t only affect Krebs, but other paying customers too.
Google offers Project Shield to human rights and election monitoring sites as well as independent news organizations that are under constant threat of cyber-attacks. Google started this after they realized that smaller, independent sites don’t have the money or technology to counter these cyber-attacks.
On Tuesday, Krebs On Security was flooded with traffic–so much traffic that it jammed up the servers of multiple websites. The attack hit Krebs’ site with over 620 gigabits per second of traffic. Krebs is now back online, and by his latest post, it seems he may still be under attack:
“I sincerely hope we can address this problem before it’s too late, and I’m deeply grateful for the overwhelming outpouring of support and solidarity that I’ve seen and heard from so many readers over the past few days. Thank you.”
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