September 28, 2004 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — According to a report by Internet research and reporting firm Netcraft (netcraft.com), credit cart processing firm Authorize.net (authorize.net) said this week that new security systems have helped to stop the ongoing distributed denial of service attack that caused the company outages at times last week.
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The company says it installed a set of new security solutions over the weekend that has been successful in preventing the sustained attack from impacting the performance of the company’s services at all.
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According to Authorize.net the attacks caused periodic downtime for customers processing credit card transactions using the service. The company says it had invested in securing its systems, and thought it was prepared. The nature of the attack, however, was something the company had never experienced.
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Netcraft says a series of other DDoS attacks have targeted payment processing firms this year, including attacks in April against Authorize-IT and 2Checkout, which were later connected to extortion schemes threatening to knock the firms offline. Authorize.net has reportedly said the current attack included attempts at extortion.
