At 6:45 am PST the team at HootSuite were forced to deal with a denial of service (DoS) attack. The company quickly responded to the attack and then responded proactively to the attack. On the HootSuite blog CEO Ryan Holmes writes: “While HootSuite users were for a short time unable to access the dashboard, service has now been restored, and no customer data was compromised. Only web traffic to the dashboard and mobile APIs was affected. HootSuite Engineering and Security teams were able to respond immediately, and are working with hosting providers to mitigate the impact of any future attacks.” Hackers use DoS attacks as a simple, albeit crude method, for taking down a company’s internet capabilities. Hackers essentially send millions, even billions of requests to a company’s services, hoping to overload their capabilities, thus shutting down their systems. In his post Holmes puts user minds at ease: “The security of our customers’ information is our highest priority. It was not put at risk today.” The company goes on to thank customers for their patience as they deal with the attack. At approximately 12:00 PM Central time the company sent an update tweet: We’ve made it no secret at SocialNewsDaily that we are fans of the HootSuite platform for both personal and enterprise use, this quick and proactive response only further strengthens our view on their platform. Source: http://socialnewsdaily.com/27263/hootsuite-dos-attack-response/

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Hootsuite Quickly Responds To DoS Attack, Ensures Users Their Data Is Secure