During the week, at least Buzzsprout, Podbean and Spreaker were targeted by hackers in a "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) attack. What does that mean?
What it means is that a bunch of hackers try to overload the site by sending as much traffic to that site as possible. The analogy Buzzsprout used yesterday was to consider it like sending as many cars as you can down the freeway so that nobody else can get through. The result was that Buzzsprout was taken offline for a short time, while other services were able to mitigate their attacks.
Buzzsprout said in a press release: "The attacker has attempted to extort Buzzsprout to end the attack. Unfortunately, paying them any money isn’t an option because DDoS attackers often use any money you pay them to fund larger attacks.
"This is obviously illegal, and we’ve contacted Federal authorities with the information we have about the attacker to bring them to justice." they said.
What does this mean for you and your podcast? So if you're using one of these services you may have received a dropoff in listens during the week, or errors in uploading. Each service says no personal data was exposed in the attack, and that by now everything should be back to normal. Your podcast should still be there as it was when you uploaded.
Photo: Sherif Moharram/Unsplash