Since the unfortunate demise of Google Reader, we've come to use feedly as our RSS feed aggregator of choice.
We're certainly not alone in having made that transition, and this morning, 11 June 2014, feedly is experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which has temporarily taken the site down.
The news aggregator Feedly says it has come under a "distributed denial of service" attack from cyber criminals, which is preventing users from accessing its service.
"The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop," representatives of the company, which has 15 million users, said in a blog post.
"We refused to give in," they added.
Graham Clulely describes what a DDoS attack entails and how you can prevent your computer from being hijacked to participate in one:
In the meantime, you can do your bit to help by making sure that your computer isn’t one of the millions around the world which form part of a botnet. Online criminals infect poorly-protected computers, recruiting them into botnets to silently participate in their spam campaigns and denial-of-service attacks. Keeping the security of your computer is essential if you want to avoid being part of the problem.
* A denial-of-service attack is illegal if you don’t have the permission of the targeted website’s owners. The only legitimate DDoS attack is one that is being done, with permission, in order to test the site’s ability to withstand an attack. In short: if you have to ask yourself if a DDoS attack is legal or not, it’s not.
Feedly will update its blog post about the 11 June 2014 DDoS attack as events progress.
And for those looking for a backup for feedly, we would recommend bookmarking Bill Parke's Economics Roundtable, which aggregates economics and finance-oriented commentary from around the web!