Popular note-taking and online archiving service Evernote has been struck by a denial of service attack which rendered it unusable for several hours.
The firm’s status page noted at 14.43 on Tuesday (Pacific Time) that Evernote.com was “currently unreachable” and that its operations team was investigating.
A further update at 18.17 the same day confirmed the DoS attack:
“We’re actively working to neutralize a denial of service attack. You may experience problems accessing your Evernote while we resolve this,” it said.
Evernote tweeted the same message.
The outage meant users were unable to sync to the cloud-based service and access their notes for several hours.
Although the firm’s status page has not been updated since that last post, Evernote has since tweeted that the
attack has been mitigated.
“Evernote is up and running. There may be a hiccup or two for the next 24 hours. We appreciate your patience,” it noted.
It’s still not known who was behind the attack.
DoS and DDoS campaigns are often waged by hacktivists like the Anonymous collective who are looking to take down a site to make a political point, although they are usually quick to take responsibility for their efforts.
Another possibility is that a cyber criminal gang was trying to blackmail the company – taking down its service until monies are paid.
It’s not the first time Evernote has been hit by a possible cyber attack. In March 2013 the firm “discovered and blocked suspicious activity” on its network and initiated a password reset for all of its users.
At the time, hackers were believed to have gained access to encrypted usernames, email addresses and passwords.
Now in its sixth year, Evernote has over 100 million users across the globe – the majority of which are in Asia Pacific (35m) and EMEA (31m), with around 27 million in North America and less than 10m in Latin America.
A report by Verisign last week claimed that DoS attacks continue to grow in volume and complexity. It reported an 83% increase in the average attack size in the first quarter of 2014 versus Q4 2013.