Raspberry Pi Foundation gets hit by a DDoS attack

THE WEBSITE OF COMPUTER CHARITY the Raspberry Pi Foundation was hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack late on Tuesday evening.

The organisation announced the attack on Twitter:

We're being DDOS'd at the moment - very sorry if you can't see the website. If it goes on, we'll try to get some more capacity in tomorrow.

— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) March 5, 2013

It also admitted that it was not the first attack on its network and said that the the attack was quite sophisticated.

For those interested, this one's quite hardcore: we're seeing a SYN flood from a botnet that seems to have about a million nodes.

— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) March 5, 2013

This is the second attack in a couple of days. We haven't had the blackmail email yet. It's getting plonked when it arrives.

— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) March 5, 2013

The INQUIRER contacted the Raspberry Pi Foundation for more information but had received no reply at the time of publication.

Jeremy Nicholls, Arbor Networks channel director for Europe, said that the attack showed that organisations should be aware of the threat of DDoS attacks and ensure that they have measures in place to protect against the risk.

"It's sad to see the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charity with a good cause at its heart, has been the focus of a vicious attack. This stunt goes to highlight the unfortunate fact that any organisation, of any size and nature, is vulnerable," he said.

"Every company that relies on internet availability to do business should be seeking to invest in prevention against DDoS attacks as well as implementing a mitigation strategy should the worst happen."

Raspberry Pi recently celebrated its one year anniversary as computer technology enthusiasts and schools have shown keen interest in the device. µ

This article was originally published on V3.