Antispam list gets spammed and DDoS attack on Blue Security Blog knocks Typepad, LiveJournal offline

Users who’ve signed with spam fighting company Blue Security have been recently targeted by spammers and attackers. And on Tuesday a massive denial-of-service attack was launched on Blue Security’s web site which then knocked millions of TypePad and LiveJournal blogs offline. This is how it happened:

When Blue Security’s web site was hit by a distributed denial of service attack attack (DDoS), the company temporarily repointed www.bluesecurity.com to a blog on Six Apart’s TypePad service. The DDoS traffic appears to have followed www.bluesecurity.com to its new home, overwhelming Six Apart’s network and knocking its TypePad and LiveJournal services offline for nearly eight hours.

Distributed denial of service attacks the target (servers and services) by overwhelming requests for information. The requests typically comes from compromised computers. As a result, legitimate users cannot access the site and service. You can see a graphic example of DDoS Attack here.