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Meetup.com offline as it refuses to pay $300 ransom to hackers

04
Mar
2014

Social networking website Meetup.com is fighting a sustained battle against cyber attackers who are demanding only $300 to call off a campaign that has kept the site offline for much of the past four days. A Meetup blog said that the company was a victim of a distributed denial of service (DDOS) campaign, a type of attack that knocks websites offline by overwhelming them with incoming traffic. Meetup’s co-founder and CEO, Scott Heiferman, said on the company’s blog that it was the first such attack in the site’s 12-year history. “Payment could make us (and all well-meaning organizations like us) a target for further extortion demands as word spread in the criminal world.” He said the small amount was likely a trick and that the perpetrators of the sophisticated attacks would likely demand more, a point internet security analyst Kevin Johnson agreed with.

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