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WorldPay fights 'massive, orchestrated' attack

DDoS assault day two

WorldPay, the Royal Bank of Scotland's Internet payment transaction outfit, is continuing to fight a sustained Internet attack which has left its services
mostly unavailable for a second day.

Since yesterday morning, WorldPay's online payment and administration system has been reduced to a crawl due to a malicious DDoS attack by unidentified computer criminals.

WorldPay stresses that no customer information has leaked as a result of the attack, which it is working hard to address. WorldPay's services allow online retailers to accept online payments via credit and debit cards and are thus integral to the operation of the many ecommerce sites that use its facilities.

The company has put in place a series of measures (including "re-routing transactions and changing its back-up processes") to mitigate the attack. As a result, some transactions are going through today, even though systems are working slowly.

WorldPay says it hopes to restore services to near-normality by the close of business today.

Worldpay's Web-based systems are being flooded with spurious requests that are eating up its bandwidth, a spokesman said.

The source of this "massive and orchestrated attack which came out of the blue" is unknown, he told The Reg. WorldPay's immediate priority is to get its systems up and running, rather than locate the attackers. It apologises to customers for any inconvenience caused by the attack.

In a statement to customers this afternoon, WorldPay said: "We are working hard to solve this problem. Although we have been subject to a 'denial-of service' attack, the integrity and security of our systems and our customers' data is in no way compromised."

"While this type of attack on our system is difficult to prevent and avoid it is purely a matter of the network capacity being overloaded by the deliberate actions of a third party," it added.

WorldPay has approximately 28,000 clients worldwide, including major concerns such as Vodafone and Sony Music Entertainment and many smaller online retailers, such as CashnCarrion, The Register's online store.

Worldpay claims 40 per cent of small and medium online retailers in Britain use its service. Around 70 per cent of its business is in the UK and Europe. ®

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