Streaming music service Deezer experienced several hours of downtime this weekend just gone, thanks, apparently, to one of those Distributed Denial Of Service attacks that were so fashionable a few years back. The source of the DDoS isn’t clear, but the streaming service says its servers were first targeted on Friday, with no real impact, but that a high level attack occurred on Saturday afternoon, taking the service offline on all platforms. DDoS attacks swamp a server with traffic so that it crashes under the weight. Deezer bosses say that while the DDoS was enough to force their service offline, no data was accessed by the attackers. The company’s IT experts identified the course of the problem and put in place measures to limit the impact of the DDoS, so that even though the server attack continued through Sunday, the service has been back online since just after midnight Saturday night. Deezer Founder Daniel Marhely said yesterday in a message to users: “As soon as we became aware of the issue we launched an investigation. We assigned ten staff members to the incident and worked to get the service back up, fuelled by a winning mix of adrenalin and pizza. The method of attack was quickly identified and actions were taken to minimise the impact on the service. We regularly adapted solutions to the changing methods of attack. New protective measures (filters to distinguish between normal incoming traffic and flooding traffic from the attack) were set up by our team, and the attacks finally stopped around 00.22 GMT”. Stressing that no user data had leaked during the attack, the Deezer man went on: “We apologise for any inconvenience. We’re continuing to investigate and are working hard on measures to counter this type of attack in the future. We have taken steps to strengthen our servers and security systems and will continue to do so. Thanks for your patience. We really appreciated your kind messages and encouraging tweets throughout the weekend”. Source: http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/ddos-attack-takes-deezer-offline/

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DDoS attack takes Deezer offline