Blue Security Shuts Down, Citing DDoS Attacks

The founder of Blue Security says it has shut down its anti-spam service, citing the impact of powerful DDoS attacks on its web site that began in late April. "After recovering from the attack, we determined that once we reactivated the Blue Community, spammers would resume their attacks." the company said on its web site. "We cannot take the responsibility for an ever-escalating cyber war through our continued operations."

When Blue Security's web site was hit by a distributed denial of service attack attack (DDoS) on May 1, the company temporarily repointed www.bluesecurity.com to a blog on Six Apart's TypePad service. The DDoS shifted to the TypePad blog, knocking all of Six Apart's web sites offline for eight hours. The attacks also caused caused network outages for Tucows, which provided Blue Security's DNS service.

Blue Security's web site was unavailable for an extended period on Sunday and Monday, and again this morning, as shown on this performance chart:

A dynamically updating chart of Blue Security's web site performance is available. Netcraft offers a web site performance monitoring service that provides similar charts, along with e-mail alerts when an outage occurs.

The attack on Blue Security is among a number of prolonged high-volume DDoS seen this year, including attacks on payment gateway StormPay, domain registrar Joker.com and the Million Dollar Homepage.