Feedly and Evernote attacked by hackers last night for money

Feedly and Evernote were just two victims of a hackers attack last night. The news agregator and the note-taking and archiving service, quickly responded to the attack and Evernote was back online after approximately 3 hours. Feedly hasn’t been able to solve the issue yet, so the developers are still struggling with the situation. The attack came from a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) and the whole purpose was about money extortion. The CEO of the news provider service, Edwin Khodabakchian affirmed that “criminals are attacking Feedly with a distributed denial of service attack. The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refuse to give in and we are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can“. Also, at 2:00 AM PST, a post on the Feedly blog informed that the data is safe and access will be restored as soon as possible. They promised to update the blog with more information but no progress has been made so far.

Regarding Evernote,the team informed via Twitter that the app and website are working properly but a few hiccups should be expected during the next day. Evernote followers were not to happy about the news, giving the fact that many of them keep their businesses alive thanks to it. Even so, they reacted positively to Evernote’s twit.  Neither Feedly or Evernote  gave up trying and they will not follow the attacker’s ransom demand. At the end of 2013, Evernote had 80 million users globally, a combined number of free and paid accounts. Feedly, originally called Feeddo, had 12 million users in May 2013 and maybe this is one of the reasons why these services were chosen for the aggressive attack.

Feedly’s CEO also informed that they are “working in parallel with other victims of the same group and with law enforcement”, in order to restore the web page. More than that, they planned on making changes to the infrastructure but a few more hours of patience will be needed until it will be completely functional again.