Credit card processing firm Authorize.Net has been the target of a "large-scale" distributed denial-of-service attack that has resulted in periodic disruptions of service for some customers, says David Schwartz, the company's marketing director. Authorize.Net provides payment-processing services for more than 91,000 small- to medium-size e-commerce firms.
Schwartz says the attack targeted the company's payment gateway service and resulted in periods of "brief disruptions" for customers.
One-Two Punch
The company received an extortion note a few days before the attacks began asking for a "substantial amount of money," Schwartz says. He did not elaborate on how the money was to have been delivered or whether the note came from a source inside the United States.
"It was something that was sent to our general mailbox," Schwartz says. Law enforcement authorities, including the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, are now investigating, he says.
This is not the first time Authorize.Net has been the subject of such attacks, Schwartz says. "We have been attacked in the past, but not on this scale and with such tenacity," he says.
The attack has resulted in an extremely high number of calls to the company's customer support center, the company said in a statement on its Web site.
Attack Strategy
The attack is the latest example of a growing trend, says Tom Corn, a vice president at Mazu Network, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based vendor of DoS-mitigation technologies.
"We are seeing a big escalation of attacks involving extortion" targeted at e-commerce companies, Corn says. Such attacks have typically tended to increase during busy periods such as the upcoming holiday season or around major events such as the Super Bowl, he says.
