Move (MOVE) received a ransom demand in connection with its recent distributed denial of service attack, which it chose not to respond to, the company announced.
The DDoS attacks have interrupted the company’s website operations since it began mid-day June 17.
Ransom demands are becoming more common with DDoS attacks, and Move is working with federal law enforcement officials to figure out how to respond. The company operates under the National Association of Realtors official website Realtor.com.
Move said it continues to work around-the-clock with the Prolexic division of Akamai Technologies, other Internet security experts and its network service providers to mitigate the attack and quickly restore operations.
Similar cyber attacks reportedly impacted Evernote and Feedly and more pertinently put a company called Code Spaces completely out of business.
Here's how Prolexic says it happens:
A malicious hacker uses a DDoS attack to make a computer resource (i.e. – website, application, e-mail, voicemail, network) stop responding to legitimate users. The malicious hacker does this by commanding a fleet of remotely-controlled computers to send a flood of network traffic to the target. The target becomes so busy dealing with the attacker’s requests that it doesn’t have time to respond to legitimate users’ requests. That can cause the target system to stop responding, resulting in long delays and outages.
The attack brings to mind recent events at Ellie Mae (ELLI). The loan origination software company back in April, believed it was the target of a "malicious" DDoS attack which created widespread access problems to its platform.
The company later clarified that it was not the target of a DDoS attack.
