Web hoster Media Temple shut down by attack
Hosting provider for major media companies suffers a temporary outage after being targeted with a distributed denial-of-service attack.
Media Temple, Web hosting provider for Adobe, ABC, Sony, NBC, Time, Volkswagen, and Starbucks, was hit with a sophisticated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack Tuesday.
The outage began about 3:50 p.m. PDT, when Media Temple's domain name servers were deluged by a flood of traffic coming from outside the U.S., and lasted a total of about two-and-a-half hours, according to a tech support representative at the Los Angeles-based company.
"Due to the sophistication of the attack, our normal DDoS firewall prevention techniques didn't block the attack adequately, as the traffic appears to be legitimate," the company reported at around 5:40 p.m. PDT.
The company said it had initially blocked all traffic from Asia, South America, and Mexico to reduce strain on the network, but later removed the blocks. As of 6:10 p.m. PDT the network was reported stable.
"Overall, network health is normalizing, however more work must be done to mitigate the effects of this incident and prevent future occurrences," the company said, adding that it would provide an update at 10 p.m. PDT.
Company representatives did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Update May 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT: A tech support representative at Media Temple said the outage lasted a total of about two-and-a-half hours.
