Meetup.com CEO Scott Heiferman has announced that the company has been hit by a DDoS attack, one that left the site reeling for about 24 hours. The hacker in question had emailed Heiferman earlier, demanding a $300 payoff in order to halt the attack. Two more DDoS attacks followed that weekend, and Heiferman had to respond to users questioning why he hadn’t paid off the attacker.
“The natural question I know many of you will ask is why we didn’t pay, especially since the amount of money demanded was ridiculously small ($300 USD),” he wrote in a blog post. “We chose not to pay because we made a decision not to negotiate with criminals.” Heiferman also suggested that giving into the attacker and paying them off would lead to further demands for larger amounts of money. In the meantime, he addressed the support Meetup had continued to receive in the meantime and underlined the fact that 60,000 meetups occurred over the weekend in spite of the attack.
