Liberty Reserve goes down again with DDoS attack

Yes, it's happened again. The online payment processor, Liberty Reserve (LR), is not accessible in many of the areas accross the world. According the the official blog site of LR, the problem has been contained and the site is up in many of the affected areas, but I myself am unable to login to my LR account as I write this article.The reason cited is that of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which has affected the LR servers.

Following is the update provided to the customers on the Official Liberty Reserve blog site:

"4/08/2009

Possible outages in some areas.

We are experiencing a sophisticated DDOS attack. We, together with Prolexic, were able to successfully mitigate the attack, although some users might still have problems accessing our web site. We are working hard to make sure everyone will be able to access our web site.

Thank you for your support.

Posted by Michelle at 1:00 PM"

DDos attack is an attack from an intentional /unintentional sources where an attempt is made to constantly flood the site with various requests and eat up the bandwidth of the site, thus causing the hosting system to malfunction or crash down.

Recently, LR had a similar problem with customers complaining of their accounts being wiped out completely. Such attacks do not help in keeping the confidence levels of consumers high and LR must take it's security policies seriously as it the people's hard earned money which they are putting on stake. The repeated attacks on LR may point the finger of suspicion on their competitors, but they need to safeguard their site and keep the customers assured of the safety of their money, as successfully being done by other payment processing sites. Otherwise, it won't be long before people start considering LR as a scam site.