One Day, Three Popular Web Services Interrupted
We’re not even over Hump Day yet and it’s already been a pretty tough week to be a professional on the Internet, as three separate popular Web services saw service disruptions due to hacks.
Feedly, Evernote, and Tweeteck all faltered, at least briefly, on Wednesday, as hackers took down each service in separate incidents.
First, both note-taking and syncing service Evernote and RSS reader Feedly were hit with what they said were DoS (denial of service) attacks, whose goal is to make a site unavailable to Web surfers. Though both attacks were successful for stretches, Evernote and Feedly have each released statements assuring users that their data is not in jeopardy.
It isn’t clear if the same hackers attacked both Evernote and Feedly. Evernote’s normal services were interrupted Tuesday, with many unable to access documents and notes stored in its cloud server. According to a tweet posted late last night from the team at Evernote, all seems to be right again, with only the expectation of “a hiccup or two” in service for the remainder of Wednesday.
The situation with Feedly, meanwhile, as of Wednesday afternoon, remains dire. Its team explained that “criminals” had attacked its servers and shut down its site in an attempted extortion.
"We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can," explained in the post signed by CEO and co-founder Edwin Khodabakchian. “Please know that you data is safe and you will be able to re-access your feedly as soon as the attack is neutralized.” Feedly users are still unable to access their RSS feeds.
Hackers holding sites ransom for cash has become increasingly common. USA Today explored the new web threat in a recent article.
This is what you’ll see at Feedly.com until the team finishes the fix. (Feedly)
An update late Wednesday morning said that, in order to circumvent the attack, the Feedly team was at work implementing ”changes to [Feedly’s] infrastructure,” and that access should be restored in a matter of hours. At the time of writing, Feedly.com and Feedly’s mobile apps are still inaccessible.
For both Feedly and Evernote, there is nothing that you need to do. Once the services reappear, you should be good to log on and use each service as usual.
If these inconveniences weren’t enough to disrupt your work this week, word began to spread Wednesday that a nasty security flaw had been discovered in popular Twitter management service Tweetdeck. Everyone using Tweetdeck, which is owned by Twitter, were urged to log out until a fix was put in place. A bug in the code allowed hackers to flash pop-up windows with crude messages, and some Twitter users inadvertently retweeted a post containing a string of code.
Though Tweetdeck itself initially gave the all clear, telling users to log out and log back in to avoid any vulnerability, a fix it was not. Twitter then took Tweetdeck services offline to patch up the flaw; about an hour later, it tweeted an all clear.
If you use Tweetdeck, you need to log out and log back in to avoid any unpleasantness. You can do that from the “Settings” icon.
Oh, and if all that wasn’t enough: The chain restaurant P.F. Chang’s was also hacked, potentially leaking thousands of credit cards.
Okay. Who’s ready to see what Thursday and Friday have in store!?
