Akamai takes Brian Krebs’ site off its servers after ‘record’ cyberattack

Brian KrebsBrian Krebs/@briankrebs

Cloud hosting giant Akamai Technologies has dumped journalist Brian Krebs from its servers after his website came under a "record" cyberattack.

"It's looking likely that KrebsOnSecurity will be offline for a while," Krebs tweeted Thursday. "Akamai's kicking me off their network tonight."

Since Tuesday, Krebs' site has been under sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), a crude method of flooding a website with traffic in order to deny legitimate users from being able to access it. The assault has flooded Krebs' site with more than 620 Gbps per second of traffic — nearly double what Akamai has seen in the past.

To put it more plainly: It's the digital equivalent of jamming a bunch of gunk into a drain pipe. Eventually, water won't be able to pass through.

When this type of attack happens on websites, they typically go down for a short period and then come back online. And for hosts, the attacks mean shifting resources to different servers to mitigate the damage.

"I can't really fault Akamai for their decision," Krebs added. "I likely cost them a ton of money today."

It doesn't seem like the site being removed from Akamai servers is because the company couldn't handle the attack. Instead, it's more likely Krebs' had worn out his welcome on the service, which is likely losing money handling such a cyberattack for a website it was hosting free of charge.

The attack may be related to Krebs' recent reporting on a website called vDOS, a service allegedly created by two Israeli men that would carry out cyberattacks on behalf of paying customers. Soon after Krebs reported on the site, the two men were arrested and the site was taken offline.

Akamai declined to comment.

This post was updated with new information from Brian Krebs that his site was hosted pro bono.