Cloud host removes Brian Krebs' website after costly cyber-attack
Akamai Technologies removed journalist Brian Krebs’ website from its cloud-hosting server last week after the site received a “record” cyber-attack. The site experienced a sustained distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and Krebs said he could not fault Akamai's decision as it had likely cost the hosting service's a lot of money to handle the scale of attack. It was suggested the attack could be related to Krebs’ recent reporting on vDOS and two ensuing arrests.

The cloud-hosting giant Akamai Technologies has dumped the website run by journalist Brian Krebs from its servers after the site 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, or DDoS, a crude method of flooding a website with traffic to deny legitimate users from being able to access it. The assault has flooded Krebs' site with more than 620 gigabits 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.

Websites targeted by this type of attack 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 as if the site's removal from Akamai's servers is because the company couldn't handle the attack. Instead, it's more likely that Krebs had worn out his welcome on the service, which is probably losing money handling such a cyberattack for a website it was hosting at no 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.