It’s often said that “no good deed goes unpunished”. Generally, this statement means that one can attempt to be helpful to others, and despite good intentions, end up paying an unexpected price.
That seems to be the case in Zemana’s good deed, in providing a free license for their superb security application; AntiLogger.
Over the course of the last few days, in conjunction with Zemana, Tech Thoughts, has been offering a free license for AntiLogger and the response has been very gratifying. For more information on this offer please read “Free Licenses for Zemana AntiLogger – 3 Days Only”, on this site.
Unfortunately, cybercriminals, who as we know are driven by opportunity, obviously saw in this free license giveaway, an opportunity to be disruptive by launching a distributed denial-of-service attack, driven by a bot network, against the Zemana license server.
If you’re unfamiliar this this type of attack, Wikipedia explains it, in part, as follows:
A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.
There are very sensible business reasons why a company, such as Zemana, gets involved in this type of promotion, but at the end of the day, it’s the individual who receives a free license who benefits immediately.
While this attack has been extremely disruptive, and very inconvenient for those readers who choose to take advantage of Zemana’s generous offer, in a real sense this attack emphasizes the level of cybercriminal activity on the Internet, and the lengths to which these Neolithic idiots will go to threaten our enjoyment of the Net.
Inadvertently, those responsible for this attack have proven how important it is to ensure, that you as an Internet user are adequately protected against cybercriminal activity. The very definition of irony.
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Bill Mullins' Weblog - Tech Thoughts 