Kim Dotcom's Mega hit by DoS attack

Kim Dotcom's file sharing service Mega was hit by a denial-of-service (DoS) attack this afternoon.

One Australian website reported the attack lasted two and a half hours.

Mega CEO Vikram Kumar told NBR ONLINE it lasted one hour.

A denial of service attack involves a bid to overwhelm a site with connection requests using automated bots, crowding out its regular users.

Mr Kumar says packet loss (interruptions to file uploads or downloads) was under 50%. "Those already logged in and the API [application programming interface] were unaffected."

Mega staff took counter-measures, Mr Kumur said, but the attack stopped on its own.

Remarkably, Kim Dotcom - seldom slow to implicate the White House and/or agents of Hollywood and the music industry in any given development - did not take to Twitter to speculate about who was behind the DoS attack.

Mr Kumar said there was no immediate indication of who was behind the attack, or their motivation.

Earlier in the day, Mr Dotcom did tweet "Only 5 months after the #Mega launch we are now pushing more bandwidth than the entire country of New Zealand." That would mean Mega is pushing more than 66 petabytes of data per month, or just under 7 million gigabytes or 67,000 terabytes of files (more expensive PCs have one terabyte hard drives).

The pirate-accused earlier mooted that Mega's high volume of traffic could help fund a giant server farm based in New Zealand, which in turn would become an anchor customer of a second cable between the NZ and the US.

His alternative vision saw a distributed server setup, with multiple Mega hosts around the world.

For now, however, Mega is hosted by a single data centre provider - Cogent in Mr Dotcom's native Germany.

Mr Kumar earlier told NBR that Mega is still on track to evolve to a distributed server set up, aided by Mega's encryption.

NBR Staff
Wed, 05 Jun 2013

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Kim Dotcom's Mega hit by DoS attack