Hackers Hit Credit Card Company: Authorize.net
 

probably has been mentioned here already, but it was news to me.

I wonder he is trying to extort them... alright fess up, who is it :1orglaugh

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,117897,00.asp

More here:
http://news.google.com/?hl=en&ncl=ht...,117897,00.asp

Hackers Hit Credit Card Company

DDoS attack on e-commerce service provider is preceded by an extortion note.

Jaikumar Vijayan, Computerworld
Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Credit card processing firm Authorize.Net has been the target of a "large-scale" distributed denial-of-service attack that has resulted in periodic disruptions of service for some customers, says David Schwartz, the company's marketing director. Authorize.Net provides payment-processing services for more than 91,000 small- to medium-size e-commerce firms.


Schwartz says the attack targeted the company's payment gateway service and resulted in periods of "brief disruptions" for customers.

One-Two Punch

The company received an extortion note a few days before the attacks began asking for a "substantial amount of money," Schwartz says. He did not elaborate on how the money was to have been delivered or whether the note came from a source inside the United States.

"It was something that was sent to our general mailbox," Schwartz says. Law enforcement authorities, including the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, are now investigating, he says.

This is not the first time Authorize.Net has been the subject of such attacks, Schwartz says. "We have been attacked in the past, but not on this scale and with such tenacity," he says.

The attack has resulted in an extremely high number of calls to the company's customer support center, the company said in a statement on its Web site.

Attack Strategy

The attack is the latest example of a growing trend, says Tom Corn, a vice president at Mazu Network, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based vendor of DoS-mitigation technologies.

"We are seeing a big escalation of attacks involving extortion" targeted at e-commerce companies, Corn says. Such attacks have typically tended to increase during busy periods such as the upcoming holiday season or around major events such as the Super Bowl, he says.

yeah i know
I have account with em

DDoS attacks are hackers?

In the media hand grenades become nuclear devices.

me too....

unless you have 10,000 friends that will do your bidding .

To ddos takes quite a few computers.

this has been happenin to online casino sites too for some time now

these denial of service attacks are becoming way to common for me. Who here has DDOS protection?

http://www.ddosprotection.com/

Something to look into.

I've always thought of hackers as people who break into networks/computers, not just people who cause them to stop working by sending a lot of requests.

interesting sig got my attention :D

In order to send alot of requests you need to control alot of computers. In order to control alot of computers you must either own thousands of computers or have access to them. The easiest way to own 10,000 computers is to own them.

See my thread about installing exe's on xp-sp2.